


Scenes from a Pineapple Revolution

by luninosity



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Charles Saving Himself From Victor Creed, Death Of Characters Who Deserve It, Extremely Dubious Consent, Falling In Love, Fire, First Meetings, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Loss of Virginity, Love Confessions, M/M, Making Love, Marriage Proposal, Operas, Oral Sex, Pineapples, Politics, Revolution, Revolutionaries In Love, Sexual Content, True Love, Victor Creed Being Creepy, Volcanoes, also see notes on chapter eleven for warnings, hurt!charles, more or less, see notes on chapter ten for the warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-08 01:18:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 52,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Erik isn’t actually trying to sell anyone pineapple, Charles is hardly a typical prince, Shaw is a villainous Regent, and there’s a revolution concealing itself in the City fog and cobblestone streets…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a promise of strawberries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kageillusionz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kageillusionz/gifts).



> I blame kage entirely for this. _Entirely._ <3
> 
> Chapter one is basically the Erik and Charles first-meeting story. :-)

Westchester was cool and pale, a city of watered silk and cobblestones, of high tea and history slowly accreting around forgotten corners. The scents of rain and mud and starched collars met and mingled in the air. Erik wasn’t certain, three months into residence, that he’d ever enjoy it all.  
  
He didn’t _not_ enjoy the city, parts of it, pieces. The broken twisted back alleyways, with queer names and narrow mouths. The unexpected flare of ironwork on a building, a fanciful relic of a bygone architect’s moment of laughter. The clean graceful sweep of new steel in an arch across the dirty brown water of the central river. The City of Westchester, heart of the surrounding state, was a city of contrasts and fogs and secrets, and Erik and secrets were longtime friends.  
  
He leaned on the corner post of his stall, in the marketplace, and watched the morning bustle.  
  
The day was trying to be clear and sunny, and not succeeding; the mist was persistent, and clung to streets and skirts and bits of sky with grim determination. The effect, in the end, was an ever-shifting play of light and shadow, evanescent.  
  
A customer came by. Paused to peruse the fruits at his stand: oranges, bananas, kiwis, coconuts, pineapple. The rare. The exotic. Erik smiled at her with all his teeth. She flushed a ladylike shade of pink, and hurried on.  
  
He no doubt could play a more convincing fruit-merchant if he cared to try. He did not. No plans to run through the city streets shouting, get your apples and pears, a dollar a bushel…  
  
No. The young Prince of Westchester liked exotic flavors; they’d all heard that. The Regent liked to keep the boy happy, which from all reports could be achieved with new books or imported delicacies, because an unhappy Prince might cause trouble in the palace. With a year to go before the Prince came of age, loyalties mattered.  
  
Erik had no feelings one way or the other about the Prince—from all reports, the boy was sickly in any case, and a scholar, and likely wouldn’t notice if the revolution took place under his nose, as long as he wasn’t personally affected. Erik did have feelings about the Regent. Unpleasant ones.  
  
The exotic-fruit import business’d been Emma’s idea. As a Lady of the Court, she knew all the fashionable tastes; she’d suggested that they might attract attention. Royal business. Connections. Perhaps even a way into the palace.  
  
So far this hadn’t happened. He was beginning to lose patience.  
  
Another customer turned up, poking a banana with a meaty finger. Erik sighed. Wondered where all these people kept coming from. Not as if he radiated approachable. Maybe it was simply that many of them had never seen a banana. Certainly the large man currently fondling the fruit seemed amazed when the peel broke open.  
  
Erik sighed again. The man looked at his face, hastily flung an overpayment on the stall window, and ran off, clutching the banana.  
  
He picked up one of the pennies, gazed at it—silver, and good quality, not copper—and considered his sign, thoughtfully. Maybe he should increase the prices. Was that something a real merchant would do?  
  
“Well,” said a cheerful voice from his left, “it’s hardly the usual business method, is it, but it does seem to be working for you.”  
  
Erik spun around. Right hand on concealed dagger. Automatic.  
  
Blue eyes regarded him with some astonishment. “Have you been having a problem with theft, then?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The weaponry? Unless that’s not a dagger under your clothing, in which case I am also very glad to meet you.”  
  
Erik opened his mouth, closed it, and finally just said, “What,” again.  
  
“Pistols might work better,” the blue eyes observed. “Noisier, of course, and still not very accurate even with the new barrel-shaping technique; but you’d have more range. _Is_ it a problem? I’m genuinely curious, you understand. I might be able to help.”  
  
“Is what—oh. No. Not really.” In part because he could take out any petty criminal who tried to grab an avocado and run, and in part because he was starting to get a reputation as someone who’d not mind handing only slightly bruised fruit to various street urchins at the end of the market days.  
  
 _Not_ because he was in favor of children, either as a distant concept or in noisy messy reality. No, it was good business practice: if he kept them placated, they’d not try to filch anything while his back was turned. No other motive.  
  
“Good, then.” The newcomer wandered around Erik’s stall, peeking interestedly into baskets, examining knobbly papaya, picking up a tangerine. Erik shoved the pennies into the cashbox and watched him shamelessly, since the man already knew precisely what he’d let himself in for, coming here.  
  
The customer was younger than he’d originally thought. Small, but not slender; those were broad shoulders beneath that concealing cloak, and ungloved hands evidenced calluses along an index finger, a thumb, where one might hold a pen. The cloak was old-fashioned, but not terribly so; most men were switching to greatcoats these days, but the older generation clung to tradition, and certain members of the younger, more politically reckless, or simply stupider, set were flaunting cloaks in defiance of the status quo, at the moment.  
  
This man might be the right age for that last option, but Erik somehow didn’t think he’d chosen fashion based on its social-commentary potential. Not someone who’d wander around gloveless and wide-eyed and intrigued by a strawberry.  
  
He had blue eyes. Incredibly, shockingly blue. Like summer oceans exploding into life, on a damp chilly City afternoon in a crowded winter-sticky marketplace, in Erik’s makeshift shop-front.  
  
Pen-calluses, old but good quality clothing, aristocratic accent, bottomless eyes. A clerk? A young lord or second son, out of family wealth, needing to work to keep up an income? And why did it _matter?_  
  
Watching the blue eyes, annoyed with himself for watching the blue eyes, Erik propped a shoulder against his chosen post, crossed his arms, glared. “Are you planning to buy anything? Or are you here to criticize my choice of defensive weaponry?”  
  
“Hmm. Both, I suspect.” The man turned, still holding the strawberry. He was smiling. It was the sort of smile that lit up the world: unguarded, exuberant, and somehow intimate as well. It proclaimed: I’m here and you’re here and this is brilliant and I’m so glad you’re sharing it with me, come closer, smile along…  
  
Erik bit down on the inside of his cheek. Hard. Self-protection. “Get on with it, then.” It was a weak response. He knew it. He was still breathless from that smile.  
  
“This is fascinating, you know.” The man waved the strawberry at him. “The way it’s practically budded into two, I mean. The size, and the shape…I wonder if one could extend Professor Mendel’s observations on pea plants to apply to strawberries? Because if you could breed them in a controlled environment, if we could see the underlying mechanism at work—”  
  
“Are you intending to pay for that?”  
  
“—if we could grow, oh, giant strawberries in the countryside, we might be able to feed—what? Oh. Sorry. Is that a pineapple?”  
  
“Yes?” Erik said, helpless in the flood of strawberry-breeding enthusiasm, and trailed ocean-wave eyes over to the fruit in question.  
  
“I love pineapple.” The eyes sparkled up at him, mischievous. “I love the brightness of it. Sunshine, and someplace tropical, someplace far away and warm, someplace not here….”  
  
Unexpectedly serious, that last phrase. They stood precisely there, looking at each other across a yellow-green heap, in the silence. Someplace not here, Erik thought. Someplace full of eagerness and sunlight and exotic fruit and scientific discoveries, for those blue eyes to feel at home.  
  
The young man had freckles on his nose. Two of them, just slightly irregular. Freckles at the base of his throat, where his scarf had slipped. Pale skin otherwise, like flawless mapping linen. A single small scar along his bottom lip, barely noticeable, the kind that came from a person’s own teeth, when struck hard across the face.  
  
That face…  
  
He stood there staring, and all the features rearranged themselves just enough in his head, enough to recall a picture. A portrait.  
  
A birthday celebration, two weeks previously. Terrible sloppily-printed broadsides with inky sketches that blurred the line of that jaw, disguised the surprisingly compact height and strength.  
  
Profiles. On official coins of the realm.  
  
Erik said absolutely nothing, because for one of the very few times in his life his brain had gone utterly blank; but the boy’s eyes changed, reading his. Slid away, and fell to the basket of pineapple, and then to the floor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—well, no, I did. I won’t apologize for not saying anything, but I will apologize for interrupting your business, if—I’ll just go.”  
  
Erik tried desperately to arrange words in his mouth that weren’t _oh fuck me you’re the Crown Prince_ or _aren’t you supposed to be practically bedridden?_ or _where the fuck are all your bodyguards, you idiot?,_ and in the gap the Prince took a step away, then two.  
  
Someplace not here, Erik heard again. Thought: scars.  
  
He said, “Wait.”  
  
The boy stopped, but didn’t turn. His shoulders looked tired, but not afraid; like a campaigner, perhaps, contemplating a next move. And Erik knew, absolutely knew, that if he let the moment go, he’d never find out these new secrets, all the alleyways and crooked puzzle-paths, behind those eyes.  
  
“Take the pineapple,” he ventured.  
  
The boy did look at him, then, and laughed, soft and rueful. The eyes were rueful, too. “I can’t take your livelihood. And I can hardly smuggle a prickly fruit that size up to my room, can I.”  
  
“I have every faith that you can manage it.” This got a real laugh, and the depthless oceans warmed with appreciation. “One pineapple won’t hurt my profits. Go on.”  
  
“Well…” Hesitation, temptation, interest. The sun came out again, popping through clouds with enviable narrative timing. “I could. I meant it when I was asking about theft, by the way. I want to know. If the markets don’t feel safe—for anyone, I mean, not only someone with an accent—oh, sorry, sorry, that was tactless, wasn’t it? That is Genoshan, though, that accent? No, never mind, you don’t have to tell me, I—”  
  
“It is. Take the damned pineapple.” Safe enough; there’d been a fair number of Genoshan refugees finding refuge in Westchester, during the civil war. Erik’s parents hadn’t been among them. Hadn’t made it that far.  
  
“I will, then.” Apology nevertheless, in that castle-banner voice, medieval spires and illuminated manuscripts all genuinely sorry for any potential old pain that might’ve been dredged up. Unfair, Erik thought, and was angry about it. That voice and those eyes. Clumsy, arrogant, passionate, _compassionate_ , sincere.  
  
No wonder the Regent wanted this boy happy. Whole armies would follow that voice and those eyes into battle.  
  
He asked, because he couldn’t not, “Aren’t you meant to be ill?” and tried to tell himself that he was inquiring for tactical reasons. If the political situation were shifting, if they’d been misinformed, the underground needed to know.  
  
He somehow couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for politics at the moment. Not if those dancing-sapphire eyes were dancing on the edge of death.  
  
The thought made him uncomfortable, viscerally, inexplicably, deep down.  
  
“I’m…” The Prince sighed, shook his head, looked up at the tent above their heads as if it might provide assistance, looked back at Erik. “I was…very badly hurt. For a rather long time. Whatever you’ve heard, it likely isn’t true, but it likely _is_ close enough. And I don’t mind Sebastian thinking I’m weaker than I am.”  
  
Sebastian Shaw, Erik’s brain filled in. The Regent. Previously the Commander of Westchester’s armies. The man who’d been sent to help keep peace amid fragmenting Genosha, with all his soldiers, and his cruelties, and his sadism. The man Erik saw in nightmares, and in blood-tinted vengeful dreams.  
  
There’d been a great deal of political infighting over the Regency, when the Prince’s mother had died five years before and left the royal family consisting of precisely one underage person. Shaw had been the strongest. But that position was a tricky one; the Regency ended, after all, when the Prince came of age.  
  
And he, Erik, had the Prince here. Within arm’s reach; within a dagger-throw, if he chose that option.  
  
“Well,” the blue eyes said, “in any case, the answer to your question is both yes and no,” and then paused, gazing at him. “Thank you for asking. Most people don’t. Of course, most people tend not to recognize me; it’s amazing what people don’t see, when they’re not looking for it. Or possibly I’m just that forgettable.”  
  
No, he wasn’t. Anything but forgettable. Never that.  
  
The Prince held out a hand, still ungloved, broad and freckled and not betraying any signs of injury. Looked at him with astonishing calm confidence, as if he’d just seen all of Erik’s thoughts and had nevertheless decided to believe that Erik wouldn’t harm him, and said, “I imagine we should be properly introduced if I’m going to consume your pineapple, so, Charles Xavier, and you are?”  
  
Confused. Offended, as someone who’d made a life out of being a weapon, at such blatant disregard of personal safety. Angry. Unwillingly fascinated by the blueness of eyes, the way they glowed over a single damned strawberry and then warmed and softened when looking over at him, inviting him into the delight.  
  
“Erik,” he said, and mentally panicked because he’d just given those palace-dwelling eyes his real first name, first tactical error he’d made in years, and what was wrong with him, giving away pineapple and revealing all his secrets and barely reining in a powerful desire to go back to that non-answer about being ill and shout until Charles told him the truth; he snapped his mouth shut on all those words, and took the offered hand.  
  
Those uncovered fingers were cold in his. And Charles didn’t seem bothered by his rudeness, or chose not to push for a last name, for detail, for more. Only smiled.  
  
“Thank you for the gift, then. Erik.”  
  
“You should have gloves,” Erik told him, running his thumb over the back of the hand in his. The gesture should’ve been strange. It wasn’t. And he thought he might mean: no, you shouldn’t have gloves, because then I’d not be able to touch your skin, to know the way your fingers curl into mine.  
  
What the _hell_ , he demanded of himself, and ordered his fingers to let go, except his hand didn’t seem to get the message and instead memorized the hill and valley of a tempting joint, a tangle of flexible bone.  
  
“I’ve never liked them,” Charles said, not taking his hand away. It was impossible to continue thinking of him as the Prince; maybe in other moments, but not now. “I spent too long lying in bed, when—I want to feel the world.”  
  
“You’re cold,” Erik said, and Charles said, “I should go,” and Erik froze, fingers stilling over that wrist.  
  
“It’s all right,” Charles said, and smiled again, and Erik wasn’t sure what he’d said or done to prompt that radiant expression, but he couldn’t look away.  “I only need to get back over the wall during the changing of the guard, that’s all. I’ll come back. For pineapple.”  
  
“When,” Erik got out, because he was a greedy and selfish and self-interested man, unscrupulous and using Charles for revolutionary access, he wasn’t sure how yet but obviously having access to the Prince would be valuable, and also he just quite desperately needed to know, needed the answer like air in his lungs, blood in his veins.  
  
“Not tomorrow. The day after? A bit earlier than this? If I can’t, though—sometimes it’s not as easy. If I can’t come I’ll send someone I trust, to tell you…”  
  
“I’ll save you all the deformed strawberries,” Erik said, and Charles laughed, and squeezed his hand, and hid proffered pineapple in the voluminous folds of antique cloak; pulled his hood back up, slipped out the door, and vanished instantly away in billows of City fog.  
  
Erik, very slowly, walked to the back of the stall, sat down on the creaking secondhand stool, and stared blankly at the multicolored tumbles of cheery fruit. He’d been holding Charles’s hand. The Crown Prince’s hand.  
  
He was planning to murder the Regent, as brutally as possible; he was working with the revolutionaries because they hated Shaw as well, his lavish spending and punishing taxes and military aggression. He knew what Emma and Azazel would say about this million-to-one chance meeting. He’d say it, in their place. And they’d all be right. He _should_ be using Charles. Gaining Charles’s trust.  
  
Seducing Charles.  
  
Sometimes it’s not as easy, Charles had said. Getting out of the palace. Because Shaw was watching him? Or because Charles had been hurt that badly, continued to be hurt even now, and was injuring himself further by sliding over walls and avoiding guardsmen?  
  
Charles thought the world outside was worth it. Charles thought that _Erik_ was worth it. Erik didn’t know how to begin to make sense of that idea, and so set it neatly aside.  
  
He _should_ tell Emma. He should finish the market day, do nothing to draw any suspicion, and go back to his rented rooms above the coffee-house, and on the way leave a particular small chalk mark on a particular street sign, and wait for a knock at his door.  
  
The day after tomorrow, he thought. Seeing Charles again. He should wait to tell Emma, because that made strategic sense; Charles must want something, must need something from him; why else would Charles reveal so much, give so much of himself, when Erik had given him nothing in return?  
  
Well. Not nothing. A pineapple. A promise of strawberries. But that couldn’t be all Charles had in mind.  
  
He’d just have to find out. The day after tomorrow.  
  
He’d seen a woman selling gloves, a few shops away, in the market. All kinds, heavy and thin, gentlemen’s and ladies’. Long, and short, and even fingerless. Charles liked feeling the world.  
  
He wondered if she had any pairs in ocean-blue, and he eyed the silver pennies in the cashbox, as they glinted happily up at him.


	2. peppermint salve for bruises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a second meeting, an argument over a newspaper, and some healing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for encouraging, reading, and generally being awesome! Chapter three, by the way, will tentatively be an Erik-and-the-revolutionaries scene, entitled "The Peanuts of Suspicion."

Earlier, Charles’d said. Next time, earlier. Erik sat on his single rickety stool reading the obnoxious newspaper, and tried not to glance at his pocketwatch every five minutes. Failed.  
  
Earlier. What did that even mean?   
  
Evidently it meant that Charles couldn’t be bothered to give him a proper estimate. Noon. One and five minutes. Half-past two. Three and a bit. _Some_ sort of definition. Honestly. Could heirs to the throne not master the art of telling time?  
  
The ever-present fog lurked lazily around the cobblestones of the square and the corners of market-stalls. The air tasted like exotic spices, imported wares, and damp. The gaslamps glowed, even in the daytime. Necessary.  
  
The newspaper was decidedly not helping his irritation. The words were too close together, huddling in an attempt to save space. The title banner curlicued too extravagantly for his liking. The ink, printed hastily and sloppily, smudged his fingers. He glared at it.  
  
He read the editorial again, more slowly, forming counterarguments in his head.   
  
The writer was a person who signed himself “Professor X,” which Erik decided was not only pretentious but made said writer sound like a villain out of a newfangled sensation novel; the same writer had been publishing steadily, weekly pleas for calm in the City, for patience, for an understanding that change was necessary but would take time. This particular column was, Erik had to admit, well-written—certainly the grammar and rhetoric was more carefully chosen than the average journalist’s blood and thunder—and potentially persuasive, if not for the fundamental flaw of the naiveté at its heart.   
  
Professor X was asking the populace to wait. To trust in established channels, in the coming end of the Regency, a year less two weeks away. Suggesting that value might remain in the institutions as they were.  
  
Erik’s hand clenched, crumpling the newsprint.  
  
And this of course was the moment Charles—the Crown Prince, Erik’s brain frantically reminded him—ducked through the flap of the stall door.  
  
“Sorry, sorry, I did mean to be here sooner—I just couldn’t—never mind, how’re you, today? Market going well?”  
  
Erik blinked, recalled after too many seconds that he was here undercover as an exotic-fruit merchant and should really give a damn about his sales, and said, “Reasonably well.” And hoped the words sounded definitive.  
  
That ocean-blue gaze was surprisingly shrewd, beneath the concealing shadows of the cloak. “You didn’t think I’d come, did you?”  
  
“I,” Erik said, uncomfortable with this insight. “You said you’d be early.”  
  
“Earlier, I said…” With a sigh, a shrug; Charles glanced around the fruit-tent, as if searching for something to serve as a distraction. The watchful mounds of pineapples and apricots and oranges provided no answer.  
  
The newspaper, evidently, did. “Oh, you read the _Times_?”  
  
“Everyone does,” Erik grumbled, annoyed by even this much disclosure of personal information, and then annoyed that he wasn’t even more annoyed. “Not exactly unusual. Highness.”  
  
“Oh, please, no, Charles…” And Charles hesitated for a split second, gaze flicking up to his and then away. “What section is that?”  
  
“Editorials. I have something for you.” Because those glorious eyes looked just a little too unsure. Too concerned about being welcome. “Here.”  
  
“You…bought me…gloves?”  
  
“They’re not expensive. They’re not even—you must have better. Never mind. I can—”  
  
“I love them.” Charles slid one on, then the other, and wiggled fingertips at him. A magic spell. Just like that. And Erik, bespelled, couldn’t look away. “Were they terribly dear, though? And you didn’t have to. I mean—not that I—I do appreciate this, I—”  
  
“You do own gloves, you’re saying.”  
  
“Well…yes. But these…” Charles regarded his own hands, wrapped in snug cerulean blue, fingertips showing and flexible under the knit. “You bought these. For me. Which is worth more than any ten tailor-ordered kid-thin sets…Erik?”  
  
A question in that tea-and-crumpets voice. Not a why; they both knew why. It’d been simmering between them since the moment they’d met.   
  
It was, however, a: why now? why this? so soon? and how can I thank you?  
  
“You had cold hands,” Erik told him. “And now you’ll owe me a favor.”  
  
Somehow this was the right thing to say; Charles smiled, tension easing. “I’m surprised you didn’t buy twenty pairs, then. I am, not to sound too arrogant, the heir to the throne.”  
  
“Only a _little_ arrogant… And that would’ve given the game away.” There was another minor thought scratching at his brain for attention. Had to do with how readily Charles’d accepted that explanation. How easy he’d found it to believe that Erik wanted something from him.  
  
True, of course. Erik wanted many things from him. That list began with palace access and ended with jewel-blue eyes dark with desire, that elegant voice ragged with need, that enticing body entirely sex-flushed and wanton and euphoric beneath him in bed.  
  
And yet the thought didn’t sit right. Thorny. Prickly as a rosebush in his head. And yet, and yet.  
  
“You’ll have to inform me how much arrogance is acceptable, then. Proper limits. You were reading this? Professor X? What did you think? I’m certain you do have an opinion.”  
  
Erik eyed the newspaper. Eyed the fingertip brushing words, heedless of ink-smears, palms enfolded safely in protective thick wool.  
  
“I think it’s naïve. Impractical.” No reason to hold back, not with the Prince asking for his honest answer. “Good intentions. But foolish.”  
  
Charles tilted an eyebrow, assessing. “Why foolish?”  
  
“The author’s asking us—everyone—to wait. But for how long? Another year? More? The Crown Prince’s birthday was only—” At which point he stopped, shocked yet again by the fact that he was declaring this _to_ the Crown Prince; Charles, however, only nodded and made a little eyebrow gesture: go on.  
  
“It’ll be nearly a year at best. And no one knows—I’m sorry—no one truly knows what the Prince will do once he becomes King. Or even—” He stopped, very fast.  
  
“Or even if he’ll live,” Charles filled in, exquisitely dry. “Yes. Well. I can reassure you on that front, at least. But you still think it’s too innocent.”  
  
“It is. The Council of Lords—they’ll never pass these reforms. There won’t be voices for the lower class, the merchants, the immigrants, women. The people in power’ll cling to power.”  
  
“They might surprise you—”  
  
“How likely is that?”  
  
Charles glanced away. Ran that fingertip slowly along the edge between the now-crinkled news of the day and Erik’s splintery makeshift accounting table, as if contrasting the different sensations, memorizing the roughness of old wood versus cheap pulp printing on his skin. “Not extremely. But if the reforms’re proposed by the King…”  
  
“They’ll be blocked even so.”  
  
“And violence is the alternative? I have heard the rumors. Dynamite in the streets. Beneath the Lords’ meeting chambers. Beneath the _royal_ chambers. Tell me how that convinces me that the revolution will be any better.”  
  
“There’ll be change. Have you seen the streets? Have you seen the people begging? The women whose husbands have deserted them, the guardsmen laughing when they violate a woman in the streets, the men out of work because they have the wrong accent, Charles?”  
  
Charles glanced over at a particularly large and leafy pineapple. Said nothing for a moment, communing in silence with the fruit, and then: “Yes. I have. Why do you think I leave the palace? It isn’t simply to meet you, as much as I’m enjoying this. I talk to people, Erik. I’ve been—not for terribly long, I admit, I’ve not been able to—but I found a way out here as soon as I could. And you—you make a living importing delicacies for the royal family. Don’t think I’ve not noticed.”  
  
Erik, who’d just sold a consignment of fresh grapefruit to the palace kitchens that morning, wanted to argue. Wanted to shout: it’s only a cover, I don’t mean it, I’m here to find a way into the palace and slide a knife into Sebastian Shaw’s throat for what he did to my parents…  
  
In the silence, Charles went on. The iron was audible, not for the first time but the most noticeable, threaded all through the cloth-of-gold. “Do you—yourself, I mean, for your own future—think rebellion is the answer? I’ve seen fighting, Erik. The Regency happened during my lifetime. I was a boy, but I remember. So much blood. So much pain. And foreigners, anyone who seems different or suspect…they’re the first to fall. So, no, I’m not as innocent as—as you think Professor X might be. I simply—I’ve seen enough death. I can’t believe it’s the right way. Not when I’m only a year from the throne.”  
  
“And will you be able to make things right,” Erik asked, once he could control his voice again, “for all the victims of Shaw’s guardsmen, of the abusive husbands, of the petty officials who’ve left mothers to starve merely because they didn’t have the appropriate City accent?”  
  
Charles said, instantly and plainly, “Never.” And then said, “Thank you,” and pulled his hood up again, fabric swirling around his face.  
  
Erik, desperate deep down in his bones for him not to leave, desperate for no easily explicable reason, shot to his feet. Flung out a hand, uselessly. “Wait.”  
  
Charles turned, framed by curtain-flaps. Wide sea-spray eyes regarded him solemnly.  
  
“You…” He didn’t know what he’d meant to say. He’d not had any words in mind. Only that he didn’t want Charles to go.  
  
Beautiful, brilliant, remarkable, irritating, thought-provoking, intoxicating—and useful, damned useful, he had to remember that—Charles.  
  
Words, belatedly, thumped home. As soon as I could, Charles’d said. I’ve not been able to leave.  
  
“You’re the Prince,” he said, for lack of anything better, aware of all the silence, the universe swelling with it. “You can go anywhere you want. Change anything you want. You’ll be King. Use it.”  
  
Charles opened his mouth, closed it, remained incredibly motionless in Erik’s doorway.   
  
“You came here,” Erik said, reminding him. “You keep your promises.”  
  
That got a swallow, a single breath of air. “I try. When I—I try not to make them. I never know if—but I thought I’d be safe. Today.” And one hand lifted to gather the concealing cloak closer around his body.  
  
Erik’s hand snapped out. Caught that pen-callused freckled one.  
  
Charles blushed intensely. “I’m sorry, I’m not—I know it’s not terribly refined—I do a lot of scientific work, and writing—”  
  
That wasn’t what’d captured his eye.  
  
“Who—Charles, who did this to you?”   
  
Those bruises were new. Hadn’t existed two days ago. There’d been no ugly purple-black soot-smudges around that forearm, visible under the swing of a sleeve.  
  
“Oh.” Charles studied his hand, cradled in Erik’s. “That…Sebastian wanted my attention, this morning. It’s all right. It looks worse than it is; I bruise easily, I always have.” But he didn’t take the hand away.  
  
“Sebastian did this to you. The Regent.” He couldn’t let his fingers clamp down in anger. They were holding wounded royal ones. “He hurt you? He’s hurt you before?”  
  
“He’s…a strong man. He likes to use his strength.” Charles didn’t shrug, hand currently being held, but the gesture lay in the inflection: it is what it is, I’m handling it, leave it alone.  
  
Erik shoved down the white-hot rage—wondered why the mere sight of injury to that pale skin was causing so _much_ rage—and said, “Sit down. I might have something. To help.”  
  
“Really?” Intrigued; and Charles tried to peek over his shoulder while Erik dove into the tiny pack he kept under the storefront, the pack full of preparations for every eventuality, in case he needed to run or fight or stitch up a wound. A spare shirt. Money. A handgun. He said, without needing to look around, “Sit, Charles,” and Charles stopped attempting to see around his back and settled back down on the stool with a sigh.  
  
“Hardly fair. If you’re planning to suggest some form of medicinal aid, I’d like to know what it is before I say yes. Is that a rope? Why do you have a rope?”  
  
“I’m planning to kidnap you. Here.” He came back over. Offered the small ceramic pot for inspection. “Salve. I use it.” And then, to provide proof, dipped a finger in. Let the wintergreen chill spread across his skin.  
  
“I trust you,” Charles said, and Erik thought helplessly, you shouldn’t. “You didn’t need to do that, but thank you.”  
  
“You _shouldn’t_ trust me,” Erik said, because he couldn’t listen to the gratitude, “you’ve only just met me. For all you know I was serious just now.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The rope?”  
  
“Oh, that.” Charles grinned. “As it happens, I do carry a knife. Two. And I’m not telling you where to find them. Anyway your rope is most likely to help with those curtain-flaps on the stall in bad weather. Is it designed for bruises?”  
  
Erik looked at him, sitting there amid piles of exotic coconut and banana and tangerine. Perched on a cracked wooden stool, wearing an ancient cloak most likely dug out of an attic bursting with stored out-of-fashion aristocratic costumes, and chattering—entirely accurately—about the needs of a fruit-merchant’s business. Hair rumpled from the hood, eyes the color of star-sapphires shining through the City gloom, and bruises braceleting his arm.  
  
Despite the supposed presence of knives—and if the second one wasn’t a lie it was impressively well-hidden, because he couldn’t spot it—and despite the straightforward discussion of potential dynamite beneath royal bedchambers, Charles somehow radiated goodness. Kindness. Like a beacon. No unhappy endings allowed in the fairytale.  
  
Charles’d asked him a question. “…yes. Well. It’s for everything. Most things. Roll up your sleeve.” He’d almost reached out to do it himself. The thought’d sleeted across his mind last-minute: a bruise like that, the size and shape of a vicious man’s hand, grabbing at a moving arm…  
  
Charles was seventeen, and only barely that. Seventeen, beautiful, in poor health in some unspecified way, and still nearly a year from his coming of age and into immense political power. Erik’s heart shivered, which surprised him since he’d believed that particular organ long used to cold.  
  
Charles pushed up the sleeve in question with his other hand, adroitly. “What’s in it?”  
  
“Herbs.” This got a scientifically-affronted glare. Erik barely managed not to laugh, and thought: good, thank you, thank G-d, not too badly injured after all. “Sorry. Peppermint, comfrey, witch hazel…beeswax…hold still.”  
  
“Where’d you learn—ouch—oh, better…thank you…parsley? I smell like an herb garden. Do you have a recipe, or did you—”  
  
“It was my mother’s,” Erik said, and ordered his hands not to pause at all, spreading the tingle of mint-green salve over fragile skin, numbing pain as much as possible after the fact. “I always keep some on hand.” He’d supplied tiny pots for most of the revolution, too. “Better?”  
  
“Very.” Charles regarded him with unnervingly truthful eyes, enormous and sincere. “Thank you. I may have to trouble you for more, sometime.”  
  
“Charles—” He stopped, fingers slick and cool, lying motionless just below the cruel mark of a different hand. “Take this batch. I’ll make more.”  
  
“If you happen to know the precise proportions, I could look into how the different components interact—”  
  
“Or you could simply use it.”  
  
“Oh, that too.” Charles’s smile was crooked, winsome, fleeting. “It seems I owe you two favors.”  
  
He should say yes. He ought to say yes. He ought to lean in and run his hand up that vulnerable arm and take advantage of the moment, the promise, the connection that’d burned so brightly since the moment they’d met, spark flickering wildly in the grey mysterious air.  
  
“Not for this.” His voice scraped roughly out of his throat. “Still only one.”  
  
“Well,” Charles said, and those splendid eyes dropped to their joined hands, medicinally messy and still touching; lifted to find his once more, and if there’d been more to that sentence it fell away into the hush.  
  
The fog wove sinuously, kittenish and playful, around tent-flaps and stall-legs. The tangerines twinkled, tiny suns in their basket. All the color in the world, and his hand on Charles’s arm.  
  
“It’ll be a few days.” Very soft, almost soundless, apologetic. “I have to—there’s a reception honoring returning army generals, and then the opening of a new national history museum—all Regency-approved, by the way, so I can only hope it’s an entertaining work of fiction—and Sebastian said something about a country estate tour, which I assume, given the season, is a distressingly transparent plan to get me out of the City. I fully expect to be too ill to be moved, but I’ll have to be convincing…”  
  
“They’ll be convinced.” It was a question.  
  
And Charles sighed. “Yes. I’m—it won’t be unheard-of. Can we leave it at that? I’ll come when I can. Next week. Not early.”  
  
No, Erik wanted to shout. No. We can’t.  
  
But that voice was so genuine. Asking him to let it go, to trust that Charles could handle himself, to listen to the request, to respect the person asking.  
  
No wonder Sebastian Shaw wanted the Crown Prince buried in the country. That voice said: I know you, I know everything about you and I’ve nevertheless chosen to think you’re trustworthy, I believe you’re a good person inside and you’ll make the best possible decision. The eyes proclaimed as much as well, unwaveringly.   
  
And that was dangerous, so dangerous, because Erik wanted for a heartbeat to believe it all. To live in a world like that, full of hope and temptingly bright. To be the good man that Charles saw. And if it worked on him, even on him…  
  
Charles could inspire armies. The universe would fall.  
  
He said, “Will you be well enough?”  
  
That gaze was endlessly blue and clear and true. “Enough.”  
  
Walking him to the tent-flap of the stall-door, subtly slipping a nectarine into his cloak-pocket to join the pot of salve, Erik told him, “Come when you can, I’ll be here, you still owe me one favor.” And Charles’s smile lit up the encroaching dusk, more effervescent than the streetlamps outside.  
  
The Tuesday next, he was both surprised and unsurprised to read Professor X’s latest editorial. The one calling for attention to the plights of incoming refugees, Genoshan and otherwise, and suggesting that human rights reforms ought to be championed by any Lord worthy of the title, which after all implied responsibility to those under one’s care.   
  
The arguments opened and ended with devastating emotional portraits—a man turned away from a job simply because he had an accent, though he also had two small motherless children; a woman begging outside the palace courtyard—and in between swept into overwhelming precedent. Reminders of the implicit contract between the head of a demesne and his vassals. Couched in such irrefutably historical terms that most readers would simply be convinced, and not realize how radical the proposal in fact was, that Lords should vote on measures based on the needs and desires of their dependents instead of their own.   
  
Erik looked at the paper very thoughtfully when he finished. Wondered who else Charles spoke to in the City, and whether any of those persons belonged to the aged stone spires of the University.  
  
His heart performed an unbidden unhappy little twitch. Charles spoke to persons who weren’t him, outside the palace walls.  
  
Of course Charles did. Charles didn’t risk the Regent’s displeasure only for him. And he’d not want that, in any case. Not that kind of single-minded impractical impassioned devotion. No room for it in his rigidly aimed life.  
  
His fingertips tingled with the memory of mint.  
  
He’d made more, to have on hand. He’d made extra.  
  
On Wednesday, the _Times_ led with a rather lurid story about the Crown Prince entering into a sudden decline, unable to leave his bed, physicians summoned, travel impossible. The Regent had reportedly thrown a vase at the wall upon hearing the news, and then tried to claim that he was simply anxious for the Prince’s well-being.  
  
This made Erik smile. And then he stopped smiling, because the writer obviously had a highly-placed source inside the palace, and those bedside accounts of excruciating pain and wandering wits and hourly doses of laudanum were given in such gleefully gruesome detail…  
  
He threw the newspaper away. I’ll come, Charles’d promised. When I can.  
  
He ordered extra pineapple, to be delivered fresh Thursday, and more to arrive on Friday as well.


	3. the peanuts of suspicion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik and the Brotherhood have a discussion, and Erik finds emotions very confusing.

The innermost cabal of revolutionary leaders met in Lady Frost’s neat crisp white-washed townhouse for tea. It was of course her _second_ townhouse, not the one she publicly owned and lived in and returned to after balls and galas and musicales. This one sat in a vastly less fashionable part of the City and let disguising dirt gather on its front steps; but nevertheless Emma served them all biscuits and tea.  
  
More accurately, Emma had said, fifteen minutes previously, “Tea?” and Alex had rolled eyes and Sean had sighed and Armando had tactfully quietly started pouring. A Lady of the Court did not serve commoners, even if she did conspire against the throne with them.  
  
Commoners, foreigners, and rebels. They’d all be executed on the spot.  
  
“So,” Emma said. “Are we reading the papers? Should we be moving up the timetable?”  
  
It was Thursday night, late, and the air was bitter. Erik’s fingers rubbed themselves together, unconsciously. When he noticed, he stopped. No scent of peppermint, no hint of coolness or warmth lingering anywhere but his imagination. Charles hadn’t come to see him.  
  
“I’m in favor,” Angel said, and took three biscuits. Her dress looked more ragged than usual; a new tear, perhaps, along the hem, where a patron’d been too rough. She made a fair amount of money dancing—and occasionally more—in a discreet gentleman’s club in a fashionably disreputable district; but it wasn’t enough, and no laws would protect her, no hospitals funded by the wealthy would admit her, if it all went wrong. “If the Prince does die off this time, there’s nothing to stop Shaw from claiming the throne.”  
  
“There may not be in any case.” Armando’s eyes were troubled. “Do we seriously believe that Shaw’s not making plans to handle one sick boy?”  
  
“He’s seventeen,” Erik said.  
  
Emma raised an eyebrow at him. “Yes, Erik, and the last I’ve heard we still come of age at eighteen, here in Westchester. Charles isn’t our concern. Removing Shaw is.”  
  
“Removing the monarchy,” Azazel said. “Removing the foolish rules of this country that have led to this. The boy will live, or he will die. He will not remain on the throne.” Janos, at his side, only nodded, because Janos could not speak. That was a legacy of a run-in with Shaw’s personal guard, off-duty, drunken, deciding a foreigner’d gazed at them oddly.  
  
Erik’s hand turned itself into a fist, unbidden. Blue eyes. Passion. Concern for his people’s well-being, all the fruit-merchants and university students and landless refugees. Charles.  
  
“Erik,” Emma observed sweetly, “do you have something to add?”  
  
He gritted teeth. “No.”  
  
“I do,” Sean said. “I still think we need a better name. Brotherhood isn’t scary.”  
  
“It isn’t meant to be,” Alex said.   
  
“It’s not?”  
  
“It’s sort of sexist. We could be the Brother-and-Sisterhood.”  
  
“C’mon, Angel, no one’s going to say that—”  
  
“If no one has any _useful_ additions,” Emma snapped. “Good. Then—”  
  
“Yes. What if Charles—if the Prince—isn’t as weak as we think? What if he resists?” Not precisely the question he wanted to ask. He couldn’t ask that one.  
  
Azazel said, “Then he resists, and he dies,” as if that were a given, obvious response to a foolish question.  
  
Armando looked at Alex.  
  
Alex started to speak, stopped. Alex, Erik remembered, was here because his brother’d gone missing two years ago; both Summers boys had been stablehands-in-training, too young even to be grooms. Scott had displeased Shaw in some fashion. Had never come home from a careless afternoon off, out with friends. No wonder Alex didn’t mind the current iteration of the revolution’s name.  
  
They were both young. Alex was only a few years younger than Charles.  
  
“In any case,” Emma interjected, in a tone that audibly wondered why they were still on the subject, “he’s evidently doing quite poorly, this time. Not that I’ve been allowed in—no one at Court has, except of course the Regent, which I can’t imagine is helping the boy at all, though it might aid his swift demise—but we do hear rumors, and—”  
  
“They’re only _rumors_.”  
  
“Erik, honestly. One might think you were a housemaid, addicted to the gossip sheets.” Emma contemplated the last biscuit. “Did you bring us anything, by the way? It’s my wealth you’re paying the import duties with.”  
  
Erik did not growl out loud, and did not kick the chair, getting up. Did not throw a strawberry at her head, or at the snow-pale walls.   
  
Did not, not even for an instant, permit his hands to shake when lifting up day-old fruit. Charles, and strawberries.  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“A banana.”  
  
“Sure it is. And what’s that, then?”  
  
Erik did fling the banana at Sean’s head. Satisfying outlet. Or would’ve been, if Sean hadn’t caught it and said “Thanks.”  
  
Erik glared, sat back down, and tried not to listen to the part of his brain currently shouting: it’s two hours to Friday morning, he said he’d come, the Regent’s been in to see him, I could get over that wall, if Charles can manage it I certainly can, I’m taller and actually healthy and extremely willing to shoot palace guards in the face…  
  
Maybe there was something wrong with him. Wrong with his heart, when it contracted sharply at the thought of Shaw’s hands on Charles. Again.  
  
“What’re these?” Alex poked at the small brown crunchy objects. “That can’t be fruit.”  
  
“Peanuts,” Erik said, half-listening. “Free. From one of the ship captains—no, you break them open, you moron—he told me they were good for strength and people eat them and he hoped they’d get popular if I—you don’t eat _that_ part—”  
  
“Must be an acquired taste.”  
  
“Some people’re allergic,” Erik informed him. “You might be.”  
  
Alex gave him a horrified look, and then transferred the look to the peanuts, as if they might be plotting to kill him.  
  
Emma sighed. “You’d be noticing by now if you couldn’t breathe. Erik, are you suggesting we try to poison the Regent with exotic…peanuts?”  
  
“No!” In fact, he’d been wondering whether Charles would like them. Whether sapphire eyes would light up and ponder the feasibility of this new food’s survival in the chilly Westchester climate. For strength, the captain’d said, grinning, holding out this new discovery in one weather-tanned palm.  
  
“Are you certain?”  
  
 _“Yes.”_  
  
“Back to the dynamite,” Azazel said.  
  
“No,” Sean said, “no, no, that’s so three weeks ago. Besides, messy.”  
  
“You are a chorus boy in the theatre. You live on the stage. You need not be near the site of detonation.”  
  
“I still have to _walk_ there.”  
  
“Some of us drive hacks for a living,” Armando said. “Carriages do not handle rubble, man.”  
  
“Also, death,” Alex said. “Remember? Lots of death?”  
  
“Not if we time it precisely.”  
  
“Would threats of dynamite be sufficient?” Emma ventured a peanut. Erik decided that he never wanted to watch Emma Frost smile while cracking open any object ever again. “If we planted evidence suggesting a bomb beneath the royal chambers, Sebastian would be forced to evacuate. In the open.”  
  
“They’ll take him to a secure location.”  
  
“I believe we have a carriage driver and a man with a fruit cart who might successfully cause a diversion.”  
  
“…you’ll terrify people,” someone said, and Erik realized that it was himself.   
  
“Yes?” Emma stared at him, eyebrows up. “That is more or less the point, darling. Chaos. Your chance at the man, in the midst of said chaos. Correct?”  
  
“Other people.” And how were those words coming from his mouth? “The Court. The—the housemaids. Everyone in the palace. In the streets. If there’s a riot.” I’ve heard the threats, Charles had said, very calmly, factually. Bombs beneath the royal apartments. How is that any better?  
  
Charles, injured and ill, might not be able to run if there was a bomb, or even a threat. Might be left alone. Defenseless, at a moment when—if the plan worked—the Regent would die, and the balance of power would tremble in the City.  
  
“Since when are you concerned with collateral damage?”  Emma sounded dangerously intrigued. “You, Erik, who of us all should have the most…personal…motivations for being here?”  
  
He did. He did; and he saw his mother’s face again, bruised and bloodied before his eyes. Saw his father beaten into the dirt by the Regent’s soldiers, the army sent to restore peace to war-torn Genosha.  
  
The foreign army had restored peace, of a sort. The sort that came with cannon and flimsy pretexts and ugly laughter. The orders of a man who’d seen the right time to invade a fragmenting land, and not cared what became of the inhabitants.  
  
His mother’d picked him up and fled. But they’d had nowhere to go.   
  
Sebastian Shaw had been the general in charge of what was officially called the Genoshan Intervention. Sebastian Shaw had gazed at Erik and his mother, laughing, when they’d been hauled before him, stumbled across by a scouting patrol.  
  
Sebastian Shaw had looked into Erik’s eyes, seen all the rage and hate and fury there, and had smiled. Had snapped his mother’s neck, casually as breaking a twig, and kicked Erik in the stomach, and turned away.  
  
You’re nothing, had been the message. Unimportant. Nothing you can do will be worth my time.  
  
Am I, Erik thought, seeing that smile all over again in Emma Frost’s colorless priceless sitting room, important now?  
  
He said, “I want him dead.” And meant it. The way he always meant it; more than anything else he could ever mean, ever want, ever plan for. He believed that.  
  
He wondered what Charles would do, in the wake of the assassination.  
  
“So,” Emma considered, “if we do make use of the dynamite—judicious use, mind you—”  
  
“I’ve met someone,” Erik said, and mentally cursed himself, and wasn’t sure why he felt so guilty. For keeping the secret? Which secret? From whom? “He can help us get inside the palace. Me, at least, and I can bring the rest of you in.”  
  
Emma set her teacup down, and lifted curious brows at him. “Not that I’m complaining, sugar, but since when is it your job and not mine to seduce the brawny and dim-witted palace guard?”  
  
“He’s not a palace guard,” Erik said, and took a sip of his coffee. The coffee was an act of defiance against the bizarre Westchestrian preference for leaves in hot water and elegant ritual pouring. He’d bought it on the way over.   
  
It tasted terrible. That was fine, he’d decided; this was revenge, and he couldn’t afford to be distracted by the decadence of beverages with not-dreadful flavor.  
  
“A bodyservant, then?” Emma put her head on one side, all that alert curiosity focused in on him. “I thought you felt they couldn’t be trusted. Too soft, too comfortable, too unused to physical danger…”  
  
“He’s not unused to danger,” Erik said, and then wondered why he’d said so, and why he had that impression at all.  
  
A memory in blue eyes. An emotion. A scar. The bruises on that wrist. He knew.   
  
“Erik,” Emma said, and regarded him coolly, “you can’t expect us to simply take your word for it. Who is it? I can verify your source’s identity, if it’s someone at Court.”  
  
“There’s no need—”  
  
“Tell us, then.”  
  
Erik forcefully pushed down the sinking feeling that he was betraying wide blue eyes, reminded himself of how much he wanted the Regent stabbed through the heart and dying at his feet, and said, “You did hope I’d meet the Prince.”  
  
This was quite possibly the only time anyone had ever rendered Emma Frost speechless.  
  
“He likes pineapple,” Erik added, and tried not to feel like he’d just stepped over a cliff, irrevocably tumbling down.  
  
“When…did you…meet Charles, then?” Recovering, and avidly curious, like the diamond on her finger. “Not this week.”  
  
“No. Last week. He was in the market. I don’t know why.” His words’d implied he’d only met Charles once; well, good. They didn’t need to know the details. Didn’t need to hear about fingerless gloves and sudden smiles and the softness of Charles’s skin under his hand.  
  
“Before he was ill…” Emma turned the information over like the peanut in her fingers, a toy to fiddle with before the crack. “He may recover. In which case you may have access, after all. He was in the market? Alone?”  
  
“As far as I could tell.”  
  
“Stupid. If Sebastian doesn’t punish him, he’ll make himself ill, or be shot by an anarchist in the street. Perhaps that’s what happened. You were friendly, I hope?”   
  
“Erik? _Friendly?_ ”  
  
Erik chose, with great dignity, to ignore Alex.  So did Emma, who lifted an eyebrow at him.  
  
“I gave him a pineapple,” Erik said.  
  
Emma sniffed. “I suppose that’s the best we could expect. Did he indicate any interest in future custom? Though it may not be a concern, if he does lamentably pass away—”  
  
“He won’t.” And then, belatedly, too belatedly: “I mean. He didn’t look unwell. This can’t be—he didn’t particularly strike me as being at death’s door.” Unless there was something he’d missed, not seen, not been told—  
  
No. No, Charles had _said_ the illness would be fake. Had promised to be well.  
  
Had promised also that no one would question his being ill.  
  
The coffee tasted like ash on his tongue. Terrible ash.  
  
Emma scrutinized him, head on one side. “Erik, don’t tell me you like the boy.”  
  
“He…seemed…harmless.” Not true. Charles had grown up in a palace, yes. But Charles had grown up with Sebastian Shaw as a guardian. Charles snuck out of the palace and convinced professors to write incendiary editorials for him. Charles, Erik was beginning to suspect, could do a great many things.  
  
If he could. If he were alive, and well.  
  
Ash, again. Scalding as the dying gasp of fire, when he swallowed the sip.  
  
“Perhaps we’ll wait.” Emma set down her tea in a brisk rustle of satin. “If he dies, he’s out of the way in any case, and we can use dynamite in either event, against a Regent or against whatever Sebastian proclaims himself to be in the absence of any true heir. If he lives, Erik can use him.”  
  
Erik’s brain wrote the words _use him_ in white-hot letters across the inside of his skull, down his spine, and around his cock; and then went away and hid for a while and let those words sink in.  
  
“Heh,” Azazel said. “Heh. Heh.”  
  
“No,” Sean said. “No. My brain. No. Bad.”  
  
“I simply meant—” Emma stopped. Pursed her lips, entertained. “If you can manage that, Erik, by all means. He’s young and sweet and starved for affection and the entire Court knows he’s a virgin; he’ll be in love with you in a heartbeat, if you can make him happy. Of course, he may prefer women. In which case you can simply be his friend and introduce him to some. And learn his way in and out of the palace, as soon as you can.”  
  
Erik, now tangled up in all the ways he would very much like to make Charles happy and the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach at the coolly voiced suggestion, set his coffee on the table. Pushed it away. Watched his hand as if it were someone else’s. Saw blue eyes in memory, laughing, arguing with him, debating methods of persuasion for the Council of Lords.  
  
He got to his feet. He had to.  
  
“I have to go,” he said, while they all stared at him, “I have an early morning,” and Emma tilted her head assessingly, but nodded, and the meeting broke up, bodies vanishing their separate ways in the fog, scattered like lost ghosts at cock-crow.  
  
He did have an early morning. Deliveries. Fresh imports. Coconuts, apples, ripened pears. Pineapple.  
  
His feet took him, unbidden, down the King’s Road, the heart of the City, the main artery of daytime bustle and trade and history and colorful attractions for bored foreign nobility doing the Grand Tour. The road led, if one took it far enough, to the palace; Erik followed the invitation further than he meant to, unthinking and entirely out of his way home, and then rationality caught up and made him nearly trip over a loose cobblestone. He caught his balance, startled a feral kitten with the motion, and ducked out of the main street and into an alleyway, swearing at himself.   
  
The kitten fled. The outer wall loomed up ahead, shadowy and unassailable and lit around the edges by sentry’s-torches. The flames flickered, predatory orange eyes gleaming through the deserted late-night murk.   
  
It _was_ late. The time of thieves and prostitutes; of stray cats and revolutionary murmurs in the streets. The space between the last carriages meandering drunkenly home from dwindling parties and the emerging calls and cries of dock-workers, paper-boys, violet-sellers. Erik, secure in the knowledge that he was more dangerous than anything else hiding in the dark, stared at the distant hulk of palace, and thought, Charles.  
  
But he didn’t have a plan. Didn’t know enough—when was the guard change? where might Charles be in that glowering pile? how did Charles get in and out of the inner keep?—and he’d not brought enough weapons, or salve, or bandages, if Charles was hurt, if Shaw’s visit had hurt him, if…  
  
Charles had a plan. He knew Charles had a plan. The end of the week, Charles had said. One more day. He’d give Charles one more day.  
  
He took his hand off his dagger, slowly, uncurling one finger at a time. He wasn’t certain when he’d put them there, cradling the weight of the hilt in his palm.  
  
He went back to his barren rented rooms above the shambling seedy coffeehouse and lay down on his narrow hard bed and closed his eyes, and thought of Sebastian Shaw, and daggers, and bruises, and Charles. He wanted Shaw dead. More than ever, now.   
  
And he wanted blue eyes to be safe and unbruised. More: he wanted them to _feel_ safe. He wanted them to feel safe because of him, and with him, and beside him. That was a new desire, and he wasn’t sure what it meant, and it made his chest feel uncomfortable, warm and excited and determined and outraged and protective and amazed, all at once. He wasn’t certain he liked the feeling, except that he suspected he did.   
  
There was a sack of peanuts flopped lazily over on the floor by the bed. He’d been planning to bring them to the stall, in the morning.   
  
Distractions. No purpose at all in regards to accomplishing the mission he’d already more or less achieved. Nothing, or at least extremely little, to do with Sebastian Shaw.  
  
He picked one up, turning it idly in his fingers, and wondered what Charles would think of the new discovery, and whether that ship’s captain had been right about nuts supplying a source of strength, or only trying to impress a potential new revenue stream.  
  
To his surprise, because he’d been very certain he’d lie awake with too many thoughts until dawn, he fell asleep fully dressed on the narrow bed, picturing Charles’s smile.


	4. there's something about blueberries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles comes back to see Erik. Some revelations (but not all of them just yet), some hurt/comfort (very necessary), some first kisses (in the rain).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blueberries are actually good for one's heart, as I recall, so it's sort of fitting for both of them!
> 
> I'm relatively sure the next scene is a Charles interlude, in the palace...

Charles appeared at last at six minutes past three on Friday afternoon. Erik knew it was six minutes past three, because Erik had been staring at his pocket-watch for approximately all day, while potential customers shied away from his expression and while the ice around the morning’s fresh pineapple slowly melted into nonexistence.  
  
The sky wasn’t exactly raining, but it was damp and sticky, the promise of thunder hanging low. The clouds crowded buildings and alleyways, hopeless grey-faced refugees stumbling down to earth. Erik sat behind his splintery table and shut his eyes, just for a second, and scrubbed his hands over his face. His bones ached. The cold had snuck in there too, having traveled from his chest, where even the imagined thought of blue eyes in agony kept setting off icicle twinges. His whole body hummed with the need to get up, to abandon the stupid masquerade, to _move_.  
  
The flap at the front of the stall rustled, and Erik lifted his head, and Charles came in.  
  
Charles, framed by ghostly wetness and dark cloak, was pale and thin and unspeakably weary; was beautiful and fragile and undeniably real.   
  
Erik shot to his feet and grabbed his shoulders in case he fell, not thinking about anything other than being present to catch him. When Charles did wobble slightly, possibly simply out of surprise, Erik’s grip tightened. So did Erik’s throat, unbidden. “You look appalling.”  
  
“Lovely to see you, as well.”  
  
“I mean—Charles, are you certain you should be—” Out of bed? Walking around? Breathing without aid?  
  
He finished, clutching at words, “…here?”  
  
“I can’t stay.” But Charles was taking a step forward, into Erik’s arms, leaning _against_ him, G-d, letting Erik hold him up. “It’s enough of a risk just being out of my room. Sebastian’s been stopping by unpredictably; I believe he’s hoping to catch me in the lie…”  
  
Erik folded both arms around him, put a hand into all that dark playful hair, and cradled Charles’s head against his shoulder while Charles breathed out into his neck; and somehow it felt completely natural, as if they’d always been meant to hold each other there and then on a rainy afternoon in the middle of a grimy City market square.  
  
“Sit down,” he said after an eternity, and drew Charles over to the rickety three-legged stool, and eased him down onto the support. Knelt beside him on the dirty cobblestones, holding both his hands—Charles was wearing his gloves—and looked up to find blue eyes shining exhaustedly, radiantly, at him. “Talk to me. What can I do?”  
  
“Oh, Erik…” And those hands curled more closely around his, holding on. Charles laughed, the sound surprised, happy, bright in the face of pain. “I never expected—I never even guessed—what _are_ we doing? I mean—”  
  
“You’re the Prince,” Erik said, and stopped, because he was about to say that that didn’t matter, that he wanted Charles, but it did matter. It mattered inescapably.  
  
“Oh, no—” Charles sounded genuinely stricken. “I didn’t mean that—Erik, I don’t care, I’d be here with you if you were a Court noble or a tenant farmer, I’d—I’m sorry. That doesn’t matter to me. You bought me gloves. You—just now, that was—please believe that it doesn’t matter.”  
  
“No,” Erik said, and ran his thumb over the back of the nearest hand, discovering attractive fair skin, royal blue wool, a hint of clinging mist-damp. That hadn’t been what he’d been thinking. And he did believe that Charles, who snuck out into the streets and cared what the shopkeepers and landlords and maids-of-all-work might need, meant the words. “What did you mean?”  
  
Charles sighed. Shoulders slumped, a fraction. There were purple-grey smudges under his eyes, Erik noticed, and he’d lost weight. The disguising cloak fell in wilder billows than ever around him. “I meant…we barely even know each other. And…realistically speaking…I’ll likely be dead before my eighteenth birthday. I—”  
  
 _ “What,” _ Erik said, quiet and furious, and his grip on Charles’s hands had to hurt, but Charles only squeezed back and refused to let go.  
  
“Erik, we have to—to consider that possibility. I know Sebastian wants the throne. And I think he’s known for quite some time that I won’t lie down and be a puppet-king once I inherit. He sent a physician, this last time, that he personally selected for me…I really don’t think a supposedly unintentional overdose of medically-prescribed cocaine would in fact cure me, do you?”  
  
“Charles,” Erik said, and his voice did not tremble with rage because he refused to let it, “tell me what’s wrong. What you need. Anything.”  
  
Another sigh; but with a hint of smile behind the sound. “So that you can commit acts of violence on my behalf?”  
  
“If it’ll help you, then yes.”  
  
“There’s not much anyone can do.” Charles turned his hand in Erik’s, so their fingers wove together. “I was…it’ll be a long story, Erik. And I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”  
  
“I’m not,” Erik told him, completely honest, and saw the startled eyebrow-jump; good. “I’m angry. And I’m thinking that Shaw has no idea how badly he’s underestimated you. I have time. If it’s a long story.”  
  
“Unfortunately, I don’t.” But Charles made no move to get up. Perhaps he simply couldn’t. Erik’s gut twisted. “If it helps, I’m not going to die tomorrow, or next week, or probably not, anyway…it’s not fatal on its own. It’s not even an illness, exactly, though I think technically they’re calling it consumption…you wouldn’t’ve been here when my father was alive, of course; did you hear anything about that? Recent City history?”  
  
He’d heard odds and ends, grumbles on the street, sideways scoffing along the lines of: the old King might’ve been cracked, but he didn’t send soldiers to the taverns to round up the prettiest barmaids for a so-called party, he’d rather have a new microscope than a new army…  
  
He said as much. Charles nodded. “It’s accurate, more or less. My father never wanted to be king—he wasn’t terrible at it, he was good at being organized, but he hated having to _do_ it. He wanted to be a scientist, to go on the voyages to the South Seas, to unlock the smallest pieces of the universe; he wanted that more than—well, more than anything. He turned the old medieval dungeons into a laboratory before I was born. And when I was four, when the influenza epidemic hit…when I say more than anything…”  
  
“He…did he…experiment on you?” He could barely bring out the words.  
  
“Yes and no.” Charles squeezed his hand again. “He did care about me. I was his child, his Heir, he’d done his duty, and he certainly would’ve mourned if I’d died. I think he loved me as much as he could. And he was there when I caught the disease, and he was there when the physicians told him I’d always have weak lungs, I’d never recover, I might die from the next bout of sniffles that went around the palace, or from the one after that…he couldn’t accept that. So he…tried everything.”  
  
“Everything…”  
  
“Yes, when you think about it, I’m lucky to be alive at all…to make the story somewhat shorter, he gave up on the night of my eighth birthday—which I spent entirely unconscious, because the medicine he’d bought from a self-styled traveling doctor turned out to be mostly opium—and when I say he gave up, I mean on everything. Me. Ruling the City. The life he couldn’t have. When I woke up my mother told me he’d had a heart attack in the night. I paid one of the maids fifty pounds to tell me the truth. She told me he’d used a pistol.”  
  
Erik knew how it felt to lose a parent. Knew the grisly gnarled holes those losses had left, and continued to leave, in what remained of his heart. He didn’t know what to say to Charles, who offered the statement in such a calmly straightforward tone. Fact. Plain and unembroidered: this happened, this way.  
  
Charles paused as if waiting for a response; when Erik couldn’t, he went on. “My mother was the first Regent, of course. She thought…well, I don’t know what she thought. I was only a boy and perpetually on the brink of death, or at least everyone believed I was; she was devastated and a widow and she was drinking quite a lot of brandy and she somehow married a man named Kurt Marko—Duke Marko, if one wants to be technical about it, though as far as I could tell his ancestors got the title by bloodily losing a lot of battles. He had a son. They weren’t terribly bright, and I believe they hoped that if I died young Cain would magically become king.”  
  
“Obviously,” Erik said, very carefully—there was a fracture in that marvelous voice when Charles said his stepfather’s name, cracking like ice under pressure—“you didn’t.”  
  
“No. Evidently if one can survive being _accidentally_ pushed down the Grand Staircase, one can survive anything.”  
  
This time Erik said a number of words, any one of which would’ve earned him a fifteen-minute lecture from his mother on the crudeness of his vocabulary.  
  
Charles smiled, not happily. “Yes. Very much so. That’s the story, more or less. Kurt died in the fire that took out the west wing seven years ago; my mother killed herself slowly with the brandy over the following year, and Sebastian came back from Genosha covered in what people said was glory and the Council of Lords decided that such a successful General would be an excellent Regent for me. I’ve always wondered how many of their children he threatened.”  
  
“Stay with me,” Erik said, while his brain shouted, _what the hell are you saying?_ “Don’t go back. You can’t go back to that—Charles, you said yourself he just tried to have you murdered—”  
  
“I have to.” Charles looked at their joined hands, took a deep breath, struggled to stand; Erik caught his shoulders as he got up, and demanded, “Why?”  
  
“I can’t just leave—”  
  
“You can!” Before Sebastian succeeded. Before the _Brotherhood_ succeeded. He wanted to shake Charles into seeing reason. “You don’t have to—to be king, you can walk away, right now, with me, and we’ll—”  
  
“We’ll what? Run off and join the revolutionaries?” Blue eyes flared with anger, sudden and incandescent; under that, and even more devastating, was the hurt. “I can’t do that. This is my home. I’ve been out in the streets and I’ve been arguing for change in the _Times_ and I know I can never fix what Sebastian’s done these last five years but I’m damn well going to try if I get the chance. And—”  
  
Erik opened his mouth. Charles kept talking, fierce and defiant and magnificent. “—what do you think would happen to my valet? My personal guard? My own physician—Henry McCoy’s been my friend for years, and you know what Sebastian would do to him if I disappeared. I won’t do that. Don’t ask.”  
  
Erik opened his mouth again, and then closed it, and then ran a hand through Charles’s hair, brushing a lock of it back where it’d fallen into brilliant breathless eyes; finally, just pulled him close and rested their heads together, and that complicated emotion came back inside his chest and left him breathless too, dizzy with frustration and admiration and desire and outraged protective affection.  
  
“You said,” he murmured, not precisely an apology but a moving ahead, “that you wrote for the _Times_ …”  
  
“I thought you’d guessed. Professor X.” Charles was still breathing too fast, cheeks flushed. “I imagined it’d be obvious, after last week.”  
  
“I suppose,” Erik said, and then paused, because there was no way that sentence wouldn’t sound insulting. Charles said it for him.  
  
“You assumed I’d convinced someone to write it for me? No. My arguments, my writing; no one else who might get caught in the crossfire if Sebastian gets offended. I leave the envelopes anonymously in a pew in St. Bride’s. My contact at the _Times_ collects them there.”  
  
“Charles,” Erik said, shaking his head. “Charles.”  
  
“Yes, I know—” That reply, whatever it would’ve been, broke off abruptly; Charles’s face was very white, all at once. “Erik, I think—I can’t quite breathe, I’m sorry, I—”  
  
“No— _no_ —” He was holding Charles up, as knees buckled, as blue eyes slid shut. “No—Charles, look at me, no, oh no, fuck—”   
  
On the ground. Uneven ancient grime and cobblestones cruel under bodies. Himself shaking Charles, hands overly harsh. Abrupt. Reaction. “Come on—you can breathe, you _can_ , sit up, Charles, we need air in your lungs—”  
  
“Sorry—”  
  
“Don’t _talk_ —!”  
  
“Would’ve been—a perfect example—if I’d timed it right—Erik, sorry, I think I’m going to pass out—”  
  
“You are not!” He tried to shift limp weight into a better position in his arms. His left leg had ended up skewed painfully beneath them, when they’d hit the ground. And Charles couldn’t seem to pull air into empty lungs.  
  
“Look at me,” he ordered, and tapped one freckled cheek with his hand, hard enough to elicit a small shocked gasp. “Listen to me. I’m telling you to breathe, Charles, slowly, deep breaths, with me. In. Out. Again—are you listening? Charles?”  
  
“Still…here…”  
  
Still here. Thank G-d. The relief couldn’t set in, though; Charles was collapsed bonelessly against him, not taking any of his own weight, and clearly not getting enough oxygen from those shallow pants. Erik pressed fingers to his throat, found a pulse, and the pulse was far too fast, humming under his touch like hummingbird wings. Charles’s head fell to the side, exposing the elegant line of his neck.  
  
“Charles—oh, _hell_ —” No good words. He was losing Westchestrian vocabulary, mind full of Charles, Charles, closed eyes and horrifically unmoving limbs and faint broken gulps for air…  
  
He propped Charles up in one arm, frantic. Did he have a spare paper sack, something to breathe into, anything that’d come with the deliveries that morning—no, nothing within reach, and he couldn’t let go—  
  
“Erik,” Charles said, eyes still shut, trying hard. “Sorry—”  
  
“Be still. Don’t talk. Just—” What? Stay alive, stay with me, don’t die in my arms when you told me you’d be all right?  
  
“Just breathe. With me. In. Out. Deeper than that. Slowly. Again.” He’d left his hand cradling that head, tracking Charles’s pulse with cold fingers. Loops of dark hair curled over his hand, frightened too, holding him while he held Charles.  
  
“Again. You can. Slowly, Charles. Stay calm. Don’t push. Please.”  
  
No sounds existed in the tent, in the world, except those ragged inhales. Exhales. More steady, or growing so, he thought. Hoped. Would’ve prayed, if he’d still had any faith in his mother’s deity.  
  
In infinitesimal gradual increments, the tension faded away. That racing heartbeat settled, evened out, found rhythm. And Charles sighed, and put his head on Erik’s shoulder, drained of all energy but safe, _safe_. Erik held him, his own heart throbbing strangely, ebbing terror mingled with triumph. Charles was breathing, and alive.  
  
“I’m all right,” Charles whispered, and the words came out without breaking apart in the middle. “I’ll be all right. Erik—thank you, I—”  
  
“No. This…” He stroked dark hair, carefully. Earned a barely audible pleased hum, as Charles leaned into the caress. “…does this happen often?”  
  
“Not usually this badly…but sometimes…I did say they’d believe me about being ill…probably should’ve eaten something, earlier…”  
  
“When was the last time you ate?” He had noticed that Charles seemed thin. “Here, don’t move—” He stretched an arm towards the closest basket. Grabbed a handful of fruit. Blueberries; all right, then. That’d work.  
  
When he held one to colorless lips, Charles blinked. “Really?”  
  
“Eat it.”  
  
“I wasn’t protesting, I was only—mmph—observing—aren’t these seasonal—will you stop that—”  
  
“No.” He could sit there and hand-feed Charles blueberries all day if he had to.   
  
Rather surprising, in fact, how very much he wanted to sit there and hand-feed Charles blueberries all day. “Better?”  
  
“I think it does help, in fact.” Charles opened his mouth for the next berry. Erik suddenly became extremely aware that his fingers were brushing sticky juice-wet lips, fumbled with the piece of fruit, and nearly dropped it.   
  
Charles caught the fruit on his tongue, chewed, swallowed. Erik panicked internally, because Charles had just narrowly escaped dying in his arms and now was not the time, if there ever was a time, for inappropriate thoughts about how much he’d like those lips to close around his fingers or other parts of his anatomy, and Charles was seventeen and a virgin and had _no fucking idea_ about the depth of the obscene images currently running through Erik’s head.  
  
He cleared his throat. Resolutely fed Charles a few more berries, which was an exquisite form of self-torment, but he didn’t trust the reliability of shaken freckled fingers just yet.  
  
“To answer your question, I had tea this morning. And a slice of toast. I’ve not been able to keep much food down. Only half on purpose; Sebastian’s physicians’re sadists, I suspect.”  
  
“ _Half_ on purpose?”  
  
“Yes, well…when one’s being force-fed laudanum—among other things—every two hours, it’s not much of a choice. Lose one’s mind to drugs, or, er, attempt to lose the drugs from one’s stomach, after the physicians leave…I suspect they’re also not aware that I spent much of my childhood inadvertently building up my tolerance for opiates. I’m all right, really, I can sit up. Hank—my personal physician, Henry McCoy—knows when I’m not actually ill, by the way. He’s invaluable. I did say I could sit up.”  
  
“No. So…you’re ill, you’ve not been eating, you’ve been…drugged…” He had to not picture Charles being held down and dosed with opium-laced alcohol. Among _other_ things. If he did, he’d end up murdering every person in the palace with his bare hands. “And you climbed over a wall to get here—”  
  
“There’s also a tunnel.”  
  
“ _Not_ helping.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“Is there anything else I should know?” He touched his index finger to the corner of Charles’s mouth, pretending there’d been a need; some color was returning to lips and cheeks and skin. He didn’t mean to touch, not precisely, but his body’d chosen to act of its own volition. “If I ask you again, that question…”  
  
“I can’t.” Charles turned his head, kissed Erik’s finger, very quickly. Blushed, after, pink washing over all the gold-dust freckles. “I would. I want—this. You. But I can’t. I do have to go. I don’t know when Sebastian will come by. Hank will try to stall him, but it won’t work forever.”  
  
“I can come with you.” In that instant, he wasn’t thinking of the revolution or of palace access. The instant after, he realized he should’ve been.   
  
He ought to feel remorse for that. But Charles had kissed him.  
  
“You need to work.” Charles hesitated, eyebrows drawing together. “You—I haven’t asked, I’m so sorry, how _is_ business? You’re here for a reason; I keep interfering with your profits…”  
  
“That,” Erik told him, “is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said,” because it was. “I need to check your pulse.”  
  
“Oh…all right…if you really…” Charles stopped talking. Erik’s hand had slid very gently, very determinedly, to the side of his throat, fingertips finding his pulse-point, the butterfly-cadence beat beneath skin. Erik’s hand was large. And Charles’s throat was slim and vulnerable, no scarf, not even a high collar; and all that skin was warm and soft.  
  
Charles swallowed. Erik felt the motion everywhere.  
  
The moment hung in the air, blueberry-scented, and became an eternity.  
  
“Too fast,” Erik said, very very softly.   
  
“You know why,” Charles said. “Not because I’m ill.”  
  
“No.” He swallowed, too. “But you are. Ill. And you’re seventeen. Charles, have you even—have you ever—”  
  
That chin lifted stubbornly. “I’ve done a lot of reading.”  
  
“Oh hell,” Erik said again, helplessly.  
  
“And I have hands,” Charles offered, presumably under the impression that this would be reassuring. “Fingers. I’ve, ah…well, you know, you must…anyway you’re not that much older than I am!”  
  
“The years don’t matter!” Only a handful of them, at a guess; but Charles hadn’t had to survive on his own for over a decade, had never been young and penniless and alone in a land teeming with foreign enemy soldiers…  
  
Mostly through sheer ferocity, agility, and enough intelligence to evade the worst types of predators, he’d made his way from town to town, and eventually, eventfully, across the border, blending in with other Genoshan refugees. He’d worked odd jobs—at the docks, as a messenger boy, at a tavern—and stalked the soldiers he recognized, when Shaw’s army returned in supposed triumph. He’d learned to fight from them, and he’d learned to kill them, and he’d learned to entice them, when he had to.  
  
And Charles, beautiful paradoxical innocent-and-not Charles, who would throw himself in front of his people to save their lives in a heartbeat but who thought that simple reading might prepare him for wanting Erik—for, oh G-d, wanting of all people _Erik_ —  
  
“Sebastian offered to send me a prostitute,” Charles said. “On my fifteenth birthday. As if I’d trust anyone he chose for me. I do know what I want, you understand. And you gave me a pineapple, the first day we met.”  
  
“That doesn’t mean I’d be good for you in bed!”  
  
“It means you’d care.” Blue eyes found his, unwavering. Erik tried not to think about the way they’d fluttered shut, a few moments before. “It means you’d care if it was good for me. I hope. I’d…like that, for a first time.”  
  
“You can’t even breathe,” Erik said, walking on quicksand. “You—what if—Charles, no.”  
  
“See, you do care…” But that was a flash of hurt, too, a flying-fish of silver anguish in all the blue. “Or—is it not the same? You care, but you don’t want me that way—is it that I’m a virgin, because I can go out right now and find someone else to—”  
  
“ _No_.” He almost didn’t recognize his own voice. Dark and primal and practically a growl. “Fuck, no—Charles, I want you. I want you so damn much. I’d push you down on the ground and take you right here, and you’d taste like blueberries, and you’d let me—”  
  
He heard the gasp, but Charles whispered, “Yes,” eyes huge.  
  
“You’d let me,” Erik said again, “you’d let me fucking ruin you, Charles, you have no idea, all the things I’d do to you, you’d never be the same—”  
  
“I’m already not.” A lip-lick, shining moisture in the wake of pink tongue. “You already have.”  
  
And Erik shut his eyes, ran the hand not currently stroking a thumb along Charles’s inviting jawline over his own face, felt his heart twist around in its cage of bone and transform itself into something new, something glittering with a vein of gold and blue.   
  
Then he looked up. And took Charles’s hand with his other one. “Both of us, then. What you said. Yes.”  
  
“Together,” Charles offered, smiling. “Mutual ruining. Or—rebuilding. Becoming something new.”  
  
“I’m not going to have sex with you on the market-square ground, Charles.”  
  
“No…that sounds highly uncomfortable…not that I’d not say yes if—”  
  
“No. Not today.” If they were going to do this, he was going to make it perfect. He didn’t know much about perfect. But he’d learn.  
  
“Well, in that case…I do have to get back, Hank will be worrying…” Distressingly acute sapphire eyes met his. “There is something else, isn’t there? That you’re not telling me?”  
  
Yes. Everything. He could say it all: I’m here to kill a man, a man who lives with you in your palace; I’m here with the revolution, I’ve murdered so many men already and there’s so much blood on these hands holding yours; I’ve been told to seduce you if I can, and I can, because you’ve said yes, because you _trust_ _me_ —  
  
“It’s all right,” Charles said, quietly, and closed fingers more securely around his. “If you don’t want to—if it’s something you can’t say—I know many of the refugees didn’t have…the easiest time, coming here, and I—sorry, tactless again, sorry. You don’t have to tell me. I only want you to know I’m here. You’re not alone.”  
  
Erik, shocked, sat there holding him, one hand cupping his cheek and the other wrapped in the solidity of freckled fingers, and the damp chill of the cobblestones beginning to soak through his trousers; and found himself wordless. His eyes burned. His chest did, too, and he was a little afraid he was going to cry, which was absurd, because he never cried. He _could_ recall the last time he had, with precise clarity, and he’d never wept since.  
  
“I know about secrets,” Charles said. “You asked whether there was anything else you should know. I like strong tea with extra sugar if I’m feeling decadent and I wake up sometimes trying to breathe and terrified that if I go back to sleep I won’t make it to morning. That’s one that no one else knows. But you know how it feels, I think. To be unshakably convinced that you’re going to die, and to die alone, and so you stay awake and get up and put a slide under a microscope and try to make the most of whatever time you’ve got, leaving something good behind, the world better somehow than when you found it…”  
  
“You said we didn’t have to be alone,” Erik whispered, all he could manage. He felt turned inside-out, laid bare by those words, that recognition. Through the stunned blankness, he also felt the beginnings of towering ferocious anger: not at Charles, but at a world in which Charles had ever had to feel that way, alone in a comfortless bed in the shadow-riddled night. Charles, who took his own pain and turned it into an enchanted lifeline for Erik to grasp, being pulled to shore.   
  
“I can—I am here. With you. I can promise you that, Charles, I—if you ask me to stay I’ll never leave you. Here. At night.” He ran his thumb over the arch of a cheekbone, the edge of a dark eyebrow. “Anywhere.”  
  
“Stay, then,” Charles said, and shut his eyes. “With me, in bed, in the dark…”  
  
“I will.”  
  
“You can’t. Sebastian would have you shot on sight for trespassing. And we can’t hide you in a closet forever.” Charles sighed, opened both eyes, resigned but undefeated armies in sapphire. “We’ll think of something. Until then, though…walk me home? At least to the outer wall?”  
  
Erik bit back words—I can take care of myself, I can handle Shaw’s guards, I’m not leaving your side—because he knew, intellectually, that Charles was not only right but trying to compromise, to let Erik come with him as far as they could. His bones screamed in protest at the thought of letting Charles walk back into that world alone, but he shoved down the screams, because Charles was _right_ , they didn’t have a plan, and he couldn’t just vanish from the marketplace and turn up in the palace, guarding the Crown Prince and running through the halls at night to stab the Regent in the heart…  
  
He offered an arm, in the most proper Westchestrian courtly gesture he knew, and said, “May I walk you home, then, Charles?” And Charles laughed, accepting the assistance, leaning only a little extra weight on him; Charles smiled, as well, behind the amusement, understanding reflected in those spectacular eyes.  
  
They went down the street arm in arm, the air shimmering wetly in their wake and ahead. Blueberries and peanuts and tangerines like tiny suns weighed down that antique cloak-pocket, because Erik had put them there, had slid his hand into folds of fabric and let it rest daringly over the curve of one slim hip, the shape of which would, even through layers of clothing, be seared into his skin forever. Mist-sprinkles caught in the fall of Charles’s hood, the sleeve of Erik’s jacket, and long eyelashes, when Charles tipped that head to peek mischievously up at him. “Stop that,” Erik said, “you’ll get yourself recognized,” and tugged the cloak back down.   
  
He did also say, “Hang on,” and detour them over to a hot-beverage stall, doing a brisk trade at the moment for a world drowned in crystal droplets. “Here.”  
  
“Extra sugar…” Charles regarded the rough wood of the portable mug with delight, and when he glanced up, all the delight hit Erik straight and true, a startled wave of glowing heat as if he’d walked up to an unexpected bonfire. “Thank you.”  
  
“I got you leaves in boiling water,” Erik said. “Don’t.”  
  
And Charles laughed again, purely happy in that moment, and so mesmerizing that even a few formerly sullen passing heads turned their way. Erik sighed, and tugged at the cloak again.  
  
Charles led him off the main road as the outer wall of the palace hulked out of the fog, glooming and grizzling and heavily guarded. “Down here. Stay quiet—oh, damn, you’re taller than I am, I hope you can fit—”  
  
“I can fit into most places.” And then, as Charles paused in the narrow alleyway mouth to raise eyebrows at him, “Don’t say it. You shouldn’t even know those jokes. You’re seventeen.”  
  
“I did say I’d read some things.”  
  
“Do I want to know what things?”  
  
“Probably not, no…here, turn left…most people don’t know this, but this tenement row actually backs up to the oldest section of the outer wall, and the current landowners have ancient demesne rights by royal decree, so they refused to sell, so the newer wall actually runs right behind it…”  
  
“Guards, I assume.”  
  
“Of course. But there’s also a space between the two walls, and if you go up this building and time it right you can drop down between them without the patrol noticing, it’s a half-minute gap every hour when they rotate positions, and I did say there was a tunnel…have I mentioned that I enjoy history? Architectural designs over the centuries are particularly useful. Stop for a second.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Tired,” Charles admitted, and slumped against the crumbling mortar of the dingy tenement building behind them, hand suddenly shaking around the mug. “Give me a minute…”  
  
Erik, heart in his throat, carefully took the tea out of lax fingers and tried to be softer support than the run-down wall. “Are you certain you can climb the side of a building?” Or be mobile, or stand upright, or go willingly back into that gilded aristocratic monsters’ nest without Erik’s gun and knives and anger at his back…  
  
“It’s not that difficult. It’s in terrible repair, this section of the City…no money, mostly emigrants and the poor…and of course the landlords don’t care, they’re getting the income from the rents either way, and no street flower-seller or beggar or day-laborer’s getting in to see Sebastian, naturally…they’ve had two buildings collapse in the last six months alone—”  
  
 _ “What?” _  
  
“Oh, not this one, it’s slightly newer than either of those.” Charles patted his arm, breathed, leaned against Erik and the wall. “Don’t worry. I’ve been all right so far.”  
  
“That is hardly a reliable predictor of the future!”  
  
“It’s the only way I know of getting in and out without being seen.” That stubbornness again, iron behind all the blue. Erik, who knew about iron, said regardless, “For the record, you’re an idiot, Charles,” and thought, I think I love you. If this is what love is. If I know what love is. If I do, I love you.  
  
“Yes,” Charles said, and Erik panicked, because since when had Charles been able to read his mind, and Charles should never be privy to some of those thoughts, never ever, “well, possibly I am, but also I have a counterargument for you, and it’s this,” and kissed him.  
  
Charles kissed like the dawn of the universe. Like sunrise bursting wild gold and fuchsia through all the grey. Like strong tea and extra sugar and blueberry sweetness and exuberant desire, framed by the wet wool of the cloak and the dripping alleyway and the roughness of the wooden portable mug still in Erik’s astonished hand. Charles smiled while kissing, while being kissed, and Erik got over the surprise and buried a hand in his hair and yanked him closer and claimed his mouth more deeply, completely, drowning in him, in love.  
  
Charles’s legs trembled slightly; Erik broke the kiss long enough to get out, “All right—?” and Charles nodded and tugged him back in, lips teasing and innocent and seductive all at once, tongue venturing out to flirt with his. Erik promptly pushed him up against the wall—a bit of disintegrating plaster crumpled into Charles’s hair, the hood having fallen off unnoticed—and trailed kisses over his mouth, the line of his jaw and the sensitive skin just below, the beckoning expanse of graceful throat; and when he made those kisses harder, teeth and pressure and messy forcefulness, Charles moaned and wrapped a leg around his waist, head tipping to one side, baring his neck even more.  
  
“You’re going to—have marks—” Erik panted, leaving another one, the imprint of his mouth on pale delicious rain-damp skin; Charles whimpered a little and said “I don’t care, Erik, please, more,” and so Erik did it again, as Charles gasped and arched hips up against him and made him drop the tea at last.  
  
“Sorry,” he murmured, and ran a now-free hand along Charles’s arm, lifting it, pinning it above his head, recalling older bruises, other bruises, and he wanted to be gentle but Charles gasped and those eyes went huge and Erik thought, all right, then, and replaced those bruises with the grip of his own hand, enclosing both elegant wrists and holding Charles there on display for him, arms stretched high and lips wet and thoroughly kissed and a line of insistent hardness pressing through trousers to match Erik’s own.  
  
“Erik,” Charles whispered, utterly fearless and elated, and Erik opened his mouth to answer—you’re beautiful, you’re reckless and selfless and possibly even as stubborn than I am, you’re perfect, you’re about to let me ravish you in an alleyway behind your palace and you’ll love every second of it, and I love you—and then the skies exploded overhead in a deluge of epic proportions, having chosen this moment to drench the world in the next apocalyptic flood.  
  
“Oh God,” Charles said, and started laughing, cloak soaked through in seconds and entirely useless, hair plastered to his face and dripping, Erik’s hands still anchoring his wrists to the wall as the ground turned itself to mud beneath their feet. “So…I don’t suppose you’d want my first time to be in the rain, in a rubbish-decorated alley, if you were objecting to the nice dry marketplace ground earlier…”  
  
Erik let his forehead drop against Charles’s with a gentle thunk, and grumbled, “I hate your weather, Charles.”  
  
“It certainly doesn’t have much of a grasp of common politeness, does it?” Jewel-hued eyes were sparkling, though, and so Erik found himself smiling, in the face of the weather and the frustrated ache in certain physical places. Because Charles had made him smile. Here and now. In that rubbish-decorated alley, with an apple-core by his foot.  
  
“Hmm,” Charles said, and twisted his head around to eye the wall. “It’ll be a bit slippery, in this.”  
  
“How can I help you?” He was reluctant to move at all. But Charles was looking at the palace lights and biting his lip, and they were being pelted by more raindrops every second, and Charles needed to get warm…  
  
He let go of captive wrists, belatedly. Charles brought his arms down, contemplated them, shook likely unsalvageable once-expensive silk shirt-sleeves back into place, then looked up with absolute merriment in those eyes. “Erik, that…”  
  
“Should I not have—did you not want—”  
  
“No, I liked it. I just…er, you were my first kiss. First proper kiss, I mean, not rather awkward experimentation with a very interested stableboy. Is that…I mean, I did like it. You can do that again.”  
  
“I liked it too.” He ran a fingertip over Charles’s cheek, because he could. “I like kissing you, Charles. What stableboy was this?”  
  
“Oh, please, I was fourteen and lonely and he was sixteen and frankly quite willing to take advantage of me being lonely and you can’t hold that against either of us. I knew what I was doing, and why he was doing it with me. Are you angry? You look angry.”  
  
“I’m not—not at you—past tense?”  
  
“Yes. Well. Sebastian…” Charles sighed. “Sebastian. I never knew precisely what happened to him—Gabriel, I mean. Sebastian came to see me, and told me not to worry, that it’d all been taken care of. And then he laughed. I did try to find out, but…”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Erik said, and found, to his surprise, that he meant it. “You’re shivering. Go. Be warm. Drink tea. I’m asking again, can I help you?”  
  
“You already have,” Charles said, and leaned forward and kissed him again, a fleeting fantastical encounter of lips in the rain. “There. Twice, now. And yes, I think, if I can use you for assistance in getting to that window-ledge, it’s fairly straightforward from there.”  
  
Erik considered the window, considered Charles’s weight—sturdy muscles, but lighter at the moment, too slender—and simply picked him up and set him on the ledge, which made Charles laugh once more and then cling to a dilapidated shutter for balance in the wet. “Thank you!”  
  
Erik only shook his head; Charles sighed, nodded, lifted a hand—a wave, a promise, a farewell, a vow to return—and then held up three fingers: three days, then. Erik nodded back. Wondered whether Charles knew how tempted he was to swing himself onto the ledge and follow. The debate was currently very close, in his head. But he didn’t move.  
  
He waited in the storm and watched Charles, watched him slide over perilous jagged brick and rusted drainpipes with practiced grace, even wet and worn thin and tangled in black folds of waterlogged cloak. Watched him pull himself onto the rooftop, drop flat—a guard, passing by; the lantern swung dimly in the clouds—and then get up and run for the mossy-grey stone at the back of the building, the line of the old wall, in the scant seconds before the man’s replacement would return.  
  
Charles paused to wave at him one last time. Erik said, knowing he was too far away to hear, “Move, Charles, or I’ll be forced to call you an idiot again,” and waved back.  
  
Charles vanished. Erik knew it wasn’t sorcery, knew it wasn’t kidnapping, knew it wasn’t malevolent; Charles had told him there was a gap separating the walls, and so it made logical sense that one would have to drop down between them. Nevertheless his next breath lodged firmly in his throat, as blue eyes flickered out of sight between heartbeats.  
  
He stared at the sudden emptiness, tasting rain and blueberries and tea and too much sugar on his lips.   
  
He knew the way into the palace, now. At least part of it; and he could no doubt find out the rest. He knew that Charles was lonely and kind and eminently kissable in dark dangerous alleyways. He knew that Charles liked being kissed, being touched, being anchored.  
  
He let the rain fall from his hair and chin and eyelashes. It wrapped the world in shimmering silk concealment. Muffled voices, hidden secrets, in the tempest.  
  
You don’t have to tell me, Charles had said. I know about secrets. I only want you to know you’re not alone.  
  
The fallen disposable tea-mug lay forlornly on its side in a puddle. It was made to be cheap, to be thrown away; but it’d cracked when he’d dropped it, and the raindrops plopped around it like tears.  
  
Three days, he thought. Three days to figure out how to tell him. How to say, I’ve been lying to you all along but I’m not lying now, I wasn’t lying when I kissed you, I need to kill your Regent and I want to taste you on my lips always, I will buy you tea and keep you safe at night forever if you’ll say yes, you don’t have to love me, you can hate me if you need to, only let me protect you and be amazed by you and leave my heart at your feet, as ugly as it is, even if you don’t want it, it’s everything I have to give you.  
  
He didn’t know how to begin to say all that. But he couldn’t not try.   
  
The raindrops, splashing over the wood of the mug, encouraged him noisily.   
  
Charles had smiled at him. Charles had laughed because of him. He’d done that. And he was an excellent strategist. He knew about objectives and targets and campaigns. Maybe he could never make Charles smile at him again, after the confession, but maybe he could, so he had to fight for that smile.  
  
Tea. Pineapple. Microscopes. Items that made Charles happy. He could make a list. Methodical and enumerated.  
  
He was aware that he should be thinking about Emma. About the Brotherhood. And he was. But somewhere in there his priorities had shifted, and he couldn’t pinpoint the second, but he knew they had, and he knew he didn’t care. He wanted Sebastian Shaw dead, and he wanted Charles safe, and those two imperatives were all that mattered, and he realized, horrified at the wave of comprehension, that he couldn’t say which he wanted more.  
  
But he’d not have to choose. Shaw had hurt Charles. Was continuing to hurt Charles. Bruises and threats and drugs and whatever else he didn’t know. He’d not missed Charles neatly evading that question.  
  
So removing Shaw would be part of keeping Charles safe; surely Charles would see that? He had an uncomfortable feeling about that, though, and it wasn’t from the rain oozing down under his collar. While Charles might be convinced to be on-board with disposing of the Regent, the Crown Prince would not be so pleased about disposing of the monarchy altogether. And while Erik frankly could not care any less about the political structure of the City as long as the ruler wasn’t Shaw or someone equally cruel in his stead, the rest of the Brotherhood had their own agenda, and Charles would be in the way.  
  
But he had knives in his pocket and a handgun in his pack, and he’d have influence, as the man who’d taken care of the Regent. He could use that to bargain for Charles’s safety. Charles might hate him, and Emma might hate him, so it wasn’t a perfect plan, true, but it was a place to start.  
  
Charles had kissed him, laughing, only steps away from where he was currently standing. Had _wanted_ to kiss him, and had thrilled him to the core. Maybe he should just open with that, upon next seeing those sparkling blue eyes.  
  
Three days. Whatever happened after, he’d get to kiss Charles again in three days. Erik turned at last to go, squishing through alleyway mud and puddles underfoot, and found himself, inexplicably, grinning at the rain.


	5. chamomile with honey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles, in the palace, makes some plans; Hank worries; and the Regent is not pleased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first Charles POV chapter! I think there's one more of those later. Maybe two.
> 
>  **Warnings:** near the end of this chapter, Sebastian is horribly unpleasant, and that's the scene for which I had to look up Victorian electroshock therapy. It's not very explicitly described, because Charles is also being given drugs, but I figured I should warn just in case!
> 
> Apologies about the cliffhanger. Erik will be there soon.

The tunnel came up in the treasury tower. Charles regarded this, as he often did, with a kind of weary irony. Of all the valuables stored in this particular space, the most important, and best hidden, was the escape route.  
  
He shoved the trap-door lid open, hauled himself out, and then promptly collapsed on the old cracked stone floor, panting, for an indeterminate amount of time. His lungs burned. Not enough air. The tidy stacks of antique gold and silver, the chests of crown jewels and gifts from foreign dignitaries, sat placidly around the tower and made no move to help. They’d outlasted dynasties; they couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about one sickly Prince.  
  
“Yes,” Charles told them, between breaths, “well, you’re…hardly going to last long…if there is a revolution…so don’t be too… complacent,” and then pushed himself upright because if he didn’t he’d never move again, and dragged the tapestry and his usual helpful chest back over the tunnel entrance. It wasn’t a perfect disguise, but if Sebastian’s guards caught him, the tunnel’d be the least of his worries. In any case, anything heavier was out of the question.  
  
The guards were of course stationed outside the treasury doors on the floor above, content in the belief that anyone entering would have to get past them. The tower walls were thick and solid stone, built by warrior ancestors; the windows were tiny arrow-slits, designed for defense. Protection for the greatest treasures of Westchester, and for anyone inside.  
  
Plus, of course, that escape route. Charles found himself profoundly thankful for paranoid distant relations on a daily basis.   
  
The Xaviers had married into the royal family centuries ago, bringing Continental exotic blood and a staggering dowry; they’d acquired quite a few enemies, being both foreign and possessed of a nasty habit of assassinating detractors. The tunnels honeycombed the palace, littering walls and staircases and deceptively innocuous fake hills amid the castle green. Most people knew about the one behind the throne and the one in the king’s bedchamber. Sebastian’s men had found the one in the library, and the other one, the _obvious_ one, in the treasury’s back wall. Charles had memorized the fifteenth-century architectural plan of the palace, been impressed by the deliberate misdirection regarding some of the locations, and then burned the paper, even though a piece of his soul howled in protest at the irrevocable destruction of a manuscript.  
  
He sat on the floor of the treasury, surrounded by ruby and emerald and tourmaline glints, and regarded the slim rail-less stone steps thoughtfully. They wound their way up along the curve of one wall, twining like grey ivy up to the door. If he opened that door, the guards would be directly on the other side.  
  
Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The thin crack in the wall ran along the right of the main doors, and was neatly hidden when they were opened. Brilliantly simple, and consequently unnoticed by everyone, at least as far as Charles could tell.  
  
At the moment he was just trying to summon the energy to cope with the stairs. He rested arms on pulled-up legs, and dripped rainwater onto the treasury floor, and breathed. The tapestry gazed at him scornfully. Embroidered knights waved their swords, full of disdain. Charles had, even as a boy brought along on the royal inspection of crown jewels, wanted to cheer on the fleeing unicorn.  
  
His lips tingled. Might be the cold, might be the difficulty of getting air into his lungs. Might just be the memory of Erik’s lips, firm and fierce and absolutely glorious. He wanted to kiss Erik again; he wanted to kiss Erik forever.  
  
His merchant. A love story. In a market-square, in the rain. He’d never known. He’d’ve never guessed. But he was in love, he was completely in love, he knew he was, and he wanted to laugh except he needed to get up and move in case anyone came into the treasury for any reason, and anyway he couldn’t breathe all that easily.  
  
The laughter danced inside his veins regardless. Like fine wine, heady and delicious. Sparkling bubbles and the sweetness of blueberries. It was stupid and reckless—Erik was a foreigner, was not at all nobility, had secrets of his own, hadn’t even mentioned his last name—but Erik had also walked him home and kissed him in the tempest and bought him tea and held him through the dizziness and argued with him about ways and means of saving the City. Erik had kept Charles’s secrets. And Charles was in love.  
  
He touched his lips, briefly, amazed; and then did laugh, but only once, and mostly at himself, and then wobbled to his feet and ventured an attempt at the stairs.  
  
He made it about two-thirds of the way up. Had to sit down. Found himself leaning on the step under his elbow; found himself, an eyeblink after that, draped across the step, head spinning, cool dusty stone centimeters from his eyelashes when he opened his eyes. Okay. Overdoing things, then. Not exactly a surprise, but decidedly inconvenient.   
  
He stayed put, inhaling, exhaling. Imagined he could feel his own pulse, the rush in his ears echoed in the old faded tower, rock and mortar infused with his lifeblood, thumping away. The palace, the monarchy, the dying Prince. Sounded about right.  
  
I’m not really dying, he said to the silent stone beneath him. It did not answer, but did so stolidly, not deigning to argue the point. All right, Charles agreed, maybe I am. A little. The next time Sebastian sends physicians in with prescriptions for cocaine. The next time a winter chill goes around the castle, and my lungs and heart decide to stop working because they’ve just had too much to handle, having been dosed with opium and mercury and literal snake oil and whatever else my father thought I should consume at the tender age of four years and one month. I know. But I’m not dying today. Not right now.   
  
No response from the staircase or the tower walls or the mute glitter of coins below; but after a while his own brain said to him: you’d better get up, unless you’re planning to catch that final chill here on the treasury steps.   
  
Charles sighed, muttered a few of his second tutor’s favorite Latin profanities, and managed to gather legs under him. Took the first step with the aid of a hand on the curving wall, and then another step, and then a few more.  
  
When he put his hand out, tracing the hair-fine crack along the wall until it clicked, he caught sight of royal-blue wool against his skin, and he thought, Erik. And had to smile.  
  
He slipped inside the wall, kicked off muddy shoes, and hung the cloak in its usual hiding-place, where it could dry out in peace; walked through the darkness, not careless but a bit more confident in this shadowy in-between space. He knew all the turns, all the distances. No light necessary. Just him, and noiseless footfalls over hushed grey paths. The main halls and bedrooms and libraries had been fitted with carpet while his mother’d been alive; no one’d bothered to replace or refresh them, and the one in the throne room was wearing through, boot-holes in the scuffed red roses. Here, though, the floors’d never been carpeted; no one knew the passages existed, and Charles liked it that way.  
  
He trailed fingertips over a corner, in passing. He rather thought the stone appreciated the petting. Lonely, on its own. But he appreciated it, too. For one thing, it’d saved his life.  
  
Left, left again, following the line of the inner keep; up a short flight of broken stairs—Charles, even at his height, barely fit, and he wondered again about the height of those long-ago ancestors; maybe they’d all been gnomes—and one last right, except he had to lean against the wall for a second, winded. Erik, who’d not wanted to let him climb a crumbling building without help, would no doubt be referring to his intelligence in all sorts of unflattering terms; fair enough, Charles conceded, and peeked out from behind the eyes of a long-deceased ancestral portrait, saw only a deserted corridor, and eased his way out of the wall.  
  
The appropriate knock at his own door summoned Hank, who threw said door open, demanded, “Where’ve you been!” and pulled him inside. His personal guard, hovering over Hank’s shoulder, repeated the question, but louder and with more annoyed gesticulations of hands. Charles opened his mouth to answer, swayed on his feet as the room wavered, and ended up bustled into bed and supported by pillows, with Hank’s stethoscope on his chest.  
  
“That’s extremely cold, you know…ouch, Hank, seriously—did you just pinch my ear—will you stop that—”  
  
“Not until you can wake up and focus on me.” Hank held up a hand. “How many?”  
  
“Hands? One—ouch! Two fingers. That bloody hurt.” Charles sighed, and tipped his head back into welcoming fluff. The bed folded itself around him, thick woolen warmth. The fire crackled from the suite’s other room, visible through the open door; overflowing bookcases performed improbable balancing acts, and his much-loved microscope smiled up from his desk, nestled among half-finished notes. Home. Refuge. His family. “I’m all right. I’m only tired. Did Sebastian come by?”  
  
“Twice.” Raven perched on the foot of the bed. She didn’t carry a handgun—she’d never liked weapons, claiming they were props, and as such could be taken away—but she could kill a man with bare hands or feet, and probably with other body parts Charles couldn’t even begin to imagine. She’d been his bodyguard for five years. He trusted her implicitly, and nevertheless hadn’t told her about the passageways. She’d be safe, and so would Hank, if Sebastian ever discovered him there.  
  
“He’s not incredibly pleased with us.” Hank moved the stethoscope around—it was still cold; Charles glared—and listened, and then sat up. “We told him you were sleeping and shouldn’t be disturbed. And even he knows better than to try to get past Raven.” Said with a hint of a blush; Hank had been harboring an unfortunately hopeless crush for years. Raven, as far as Charles could tell, wasn’t in love with anyone at all.  
  
“He said he’d come back.” Raven looked him up and down. “Charles, did you do something to your neck?”  
  
“What—oh. No. Never mind. Completely not. Nothing.” The rain snickered meaningfully along the windowpane, above the bed.  
  
“Let me see that,” Hank said, and leaned over, and then went scarlet. “Oh. Ah…um…Charles…”  
  
“Hank,” Charles said, muffled behind his own hands over his face, “I very much do not need you to give me any sort of sex talk. Please. No.”  
  
“I _am_ your physician,” Hank said, “and you _are_ , technically, a—you still are, aren’t you, because please tell me you and he were at least careful—”  
  
“His name’s Erik,” Charles interrupted, “which you know, because I told you, and he didn’t touch me, and I will pay you an excessively large sum of money to stop talking about my sex life.”  
  
“Obviously he did, and you already pay me excessively large sums of money.” Hank picked up his hand. Tested his pulse with a professional fingertip. Charles rolled his eyes, but submitted to the inspection.   
  
“I want to meet this Erik,” Raven said. “I mean, Charles, he has you sneaking out of the palace during thunderstorms. And you said his name in your sleep last night.”  
  
“I did _not_. And it wasn’t storming when I left.” The storm’d been unmistakably on the way, but nonetheless, his point was technically valid.  
  
“Actually, you did,” Hank said, frowning slightly, shifting the finger over his wrist, checking again. “Charles, listen. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to say it anyway, as your doctor and your friend and someone who’d rather not be executed if Sebastian ends up on the throne. You’re underage and you’re the Heir and this person…sorry, Erik…is older and not from the Court and…and you literally walked in here and fainted at Raven’s feet. Overexertion. I _know_ you know. I’ve told you.”  
  
“You also told me to exercise,” Charles countered, an argument which had the benefit of being true. “And you said, and I can quote you word for word on this, that more than half of the problems with my health have to do with being instructed to lie in bed for over a decade, and that plainly most of the doctors in the City are idiots. And Erik’s not—I know you mean well, Hank, you both do, but he isn’t—he wouldn’t hurt me. He’s a good man. I trust him the same way I trust you. And you trust _me_.”  
  
“I meant you should take up running or boxing or tennis, not sexual escapades with fruit merchants. And more than half means precisely that, you understand.” Hank got up. Found the teakettle, warming itself by the fireplace. “Just because we pretend you’re dying around Sebastian, that doesn’t mean you’re not genuinely unwell, Charles.”  
  
“Yes, but that’s why I’ve got you.” He accepted the mug when Hank brought it over. The heat soaked through the porcelain, and into his skin. “Chamomile? Really?”  
  
“I’ve decided you don’t need stimulants. Did you deliver your latest article, at least? I assume you’re not spending all your time enjoying Erik’s mouth. And possibly teeth, from the look of that bruise.”  
  
Charles gazed mournfully into the depths of the mug. Wondered what Hank’d done with the stash of Earl Grey, and whether he could talk Erik into buying more, in the market. “You could’ve at least warned me. Beast. Was that an honest medical evaluation, or are you punishing me for being late?—and also, yes, thank you. Have some faith in me. It’ll be out next week. Sebastian will be furious. I called for a national census—we’ve not had one in over twenty years—and representation in the Houses based on accurate demographics. The Lords will support it, too, because it’ll allow them a larger tax base, knowing their populations.”  
  
Raven whistled. “Charles, you know how to fight dirty.”  
  
“Not really. Or only insofar as politics always are.” He took a sip of the chamomile. “Hank, you do realize people also make soap out of this. You’ve made me drink soap. And…I grew up listening. Everyone tends to assume that being ill makes a person deaf and dumb, as well. Next week I’m thinking about the Divorce Bill, by the way. It’s hardly fair that a man can petition for dissolution on the basis of incompatibility, whereas a woman has to demonstrate physical signs of something a court’s willing to publicly term abuse, is it?”  
  
“In answer to your first question, it’s both,” Hank said, and handed over honey, belated and no doubt purposefully so. The rain chattered away, gossiping to the windowsill and the cloudy sky. “I’m annoyed with you, and I don’t like the way your heart sounds. If you die, O Fearless Leader, we’ll be going immediately after you. Sebastian _looked_ at me.”  
  
“He’s a horrible person,” Raven said. “Slimy. By the way, Lady Frost also knocked. I’m not sure I like her, Charles. I’m fairly certain she didn’t believe me about you being asleep, and why was she even here?”  
  
“I…have no idea.” He watched the honey slide into the depths of the cup, golden and liquid and hypnotic. “Perhaps I should find out. Call one of the pages, would you?” It wouldn’t matter which one; they all reported to Sebastian, too scared not to, but they also _liked_ Charles, and so would go on a minor errand to the library as officially requested, and along the way would pass a verbal message from person to person and finally to one of Lady Frost’s maids that the Crown Prince seemed to be awake and receiving visitors, for once.  
  
The page who answered the ring was young Kitty, which would be even better. Kitty read the _Times_ —she didn’t know that Charles was writing as Professor X, of course, and never would—and had been thoroughly loyal to Charles since the day she’d accidentally praised one of his editorials in his presence and _hadn’t_ been beaten for possessing revolutionary sympathies. Charles had said enough to let her feel safe speaking her mind, and had mentally added another black mark in the column of Sebastian’s crimes.  
  
Kitty went off to the library, with instructions to bring back a copy of Schlieden’s observations on the cellular structure of medusa ferns. Charles put extra honey in the not-soap mockery of tea. Hank took the honey away.  
  
“I wasn’t done with that.”  
  
“Yes, you were. Did you eat anything, or were you too busy trying to save the City and let a vampire nibble on your throat? Does he have excessively sharp teeth, your merchant?”  
  
“Vampires are mythical,” Charles said, and fished around in a pocket. “Unless one speaks to Mr Stoker for any length of time. In which case one might never set foot out of doors at night again. Blueberries, and actual proper non-bathtime tea, and Erik gave me peanuts. And what I believe is a rather crushed nectarine. Here.”  
  
“Peanuts?” Raven poked at one of them. “What does it do?”  
  
“That isn’t food. Not enough, anyway. I can get the kitchens to send up toasted cheese and ham sandwiches. We’ll pretend the ham’s for us, and you can have it.”  
  
“I could, but I’m not certain I should.” Charles broke open a peanut, held the other half out to Raven. “If Sebastian comes by again…if he decides I need laudanum, and I know you weren’t precisely fond of being threatened with a pistol so you’d stop objecting, last time…I’ll just end up trying to throw it all up in the water closet after he leaves. And you know he did promise to come back.”  
  
Hank shut his eyes. Ran a hand through his hair. The rain wailed, a lost banshee, outside. “I know. I don’t like this.”  
  
“I don’t like any of it. But we don’t have a lot of options.”  
  
“The Brotherhood—” Raven said, and stopped. They’d had that argument. Many times. Charles knew where her sympathies lay; knew she stayed out of personal loyalty to him, and not out of any great love for the institution of the monarchy. Raven believed, passionately, that the world needed to change. He did as well; he just wished the only other alternative didn’t seem determinedly committed to bombs and assassination threats and extremism.  
  
“We’d never be safe,” Hank said anyway. “No one from the palace would be.”  
  
“If you told them—Charles, everything you’ve done, all the reforms—”  
  
“They might be convinced to only imprison me for life, not execute me on the spot as a symbol of the corrupt regime, or whatever that phrasing was? Maybe.” He set the second peanut-shell down neatly beside the first, on the windowsill. “They might even all be decent people at heart and let me retire to the country someplace and set up a laboratory. With no money, of course, because it all belongs to Westchester, and Sebastian still approves expenditures from my personal allowance, so I’ve not been able to hide anything away. I’d likely need bodyguards, too, in case some good citizen decides to demonstrate his or her loyalty to the new order by removing the last potential rallying point for a counter-revolution.”  
  
“Charles—”  
  
“We can’t trust anyone,” Charles said, and Raven looked away, and nodded. Charles held out a hand; she took it. The rain murmured and sighed to itself, in the background.  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Charles said, and set the nectarine in her palm; she looked surprised. “Oh, just eat it, they’re delicious, and I’ve already had two…I grew up learning how to rule. What it means to rule. My life’s been about this. I wouldn’t really know how to walk away, even if I tried. I’m probably going to die and I’m in love with Erik and I’m fucking terrified and I’m not going to see eighteen for one reason or another, so I’m at least going to decide which way I’d like to go…no, eat the whole thing, I’ve got one more, sorry, did you want a damp cloth or something?”  
  
“You _are a fucking idiot_ , Charles,” Raven said, and turned her back on him, though not in time to hide the tears.  
  
“You honestly sort of are,” Hank said, and threw a peanut at him, a bit too forcefully to be teasing. “Don’t say things. Those things. We’re trying to _not_ let you die, and you—sometimes I forget that you’re seventeen. And terrifying.”  
  
“You’re only two years older than I am,” Charles said. “You just earned the medical degree faster than anyone else our age, because you’re brilliant. Raven, I’m sorry. I am, I really am, that was stupid, I’m apologizing to both of you, I love you. Er. Not in the same way I love Erik.”  
  
“I hope not,” Raven said, and sniffed, in a tone which dared anyone to mention the crying. “You let him play vampire with your throat. Love, seriously?”  
  
“Er…I think so. Yes.” He played with a peanut, rolling it back and forth across his palm. Wanted to smile, despite the moment. “Yes. Me, anyway. I don’t know about him—we’ve never said—but I think so. Maybe. I’m seeing him again three days from now. He bought me gloves, did I tell you that?”  
  
“Twice,” Hank said. “And you get all dreamy-eyed when you say his name.”  
  
“I do not—well, maybe a little, but if you met him—”  
  
A knock. At the door. One they all recognized. Raven swore under her breath, oaths she’d picked up in the guard barracks during training. Hank shoved Charles flat into the bed, threw peanut-shells into the fire, and hissed, “Look like you’re dying!”  
  
Charles started to answer. Ended up in the clutches of a fortuitous need to cough, the result of the shove, a peanut, and uncooperative lungs irritated at being suddenly horizontal.  
  
“Good,” Hank said, “not bad, I’m even convinced,” and Charles glared, a little weakly, and Raven opened the door.  
  
Sebastian entered. More accurately, Sebastian menaced. He wasn’t even particularly flamboyant, or tall, or muscular. All of that was left to the hulking bodyguards behind him, both of whom Charles knew, neither of whom were pleasant. They loomed, and grinned as if they enjoyed it.  
  
Sebastian, though…  
  
Sebastian walked through every room as if he owned it, as if he didn’t need sweeping gestures or melodramatic monologues, because he knew he could buy or sell or kill every person in the City with a word. He had pitiless hands, and he smiled like a knife.  
  
He came over to the bed, and sat down, and radiated fatherly concern, even going to far as to brush hair back from Charles’s brow. Charles resisted the urge to bite his arm.  
  
“Tsk.” Sebastian rested the hand over his forehead. “You do feel a bit warm. Have you been sleeping well, Charles?”  
  
“Not really,” Charles said, and coughed again, mostly for effect this time. The Regent moved the hand. Good. “Did you…want something, Sebastian?”  
  
“Only to ensure your continued health.” Sebastian’s eyes were flat. Unreadable. Reptilian. Charles didn’t bother repressing the shiver. “I am responsible for your well-being, after all. It pains me that you dislike me so.”  
  
“Would you…prefer me to…apologize?”  
  
“Oh, no. Don’t feel the need to lie to me, Charles.” With a smile: I know and you know and we all know, said that smile. “Don’t _ever_ lie to me.”  
  
“Or what, you’ll kill me?” He had to laugh. “You need me.”  
  
“For now.” Sebastian put a hand out, lifted his chin. Fingers bit down like painful tiny vises, hard and cruel. Charles gasped, because the reaction was expected and because it did hurt. Hank made a sharp small forward motion; the leftmost of Sebastian’s guards, the brick wall named Victor Creed, put an arm across his chest.  
  
“You won’t matter, soon enough. I’ll have the support to claim the throne on my own terms, after your untimely demise. To make Westchester the…glorious utopia it ought to be. Purified, powerful, and, of course, entirely at my disposal. It’s unfortunate that the Lords are such traditionalists. They’d prefer continuity. Known quantities. The Xavier name. But, then, you know all that. It’s saved you so far.” Sebastian studied his face, eyes dispassionate. “It won’t save you once you become an actual threat to my power. You know that, too. So, yes, in answer to your question. I will kill you, Charles. Eventually.”  
  
“You won’t win,” Charles said, very softly, a statement of fact, not an attempt at heroic bluster. “The Brotherhood’s out there. And I’m still here.”  
  
Sebastian hit him. Vicious, and almost casual, another incontrovertible fact. The blow snapped his head to the side; he tasted blood, and saw stars.   
  
Through the ringing in that ear—had Sebastian decided to hit him more than once? wouldn’t be a surprise—he heard Raven scuffling with someone, and Hank shouting. Sebastian shook his hand out, fastidiously dabbing blood from a knuckle with the corner of Charles’s blanket. “Don’t be a martyr, Charles. I agree the role suits you, but I can promise you the pain will—”  
  
A pause. Thunder rattled the window. Went silent, as if ordered. The silence stretched out, and filled with lead.  
  
“So,” Sebastian said, all silken composure, “tell me, Charles. When were you well enough to be letting anyone kiss you, much less with such evident enthusiasm?”  
  
He could try to deny it. To claim the bruises and marks were from something else, weren’t the size and shape of a man’s mouth worshipping his skin…  
  
Too long a pause. Sebastian was angry, now. “Sleeping, were you, earlier? Not the kind of sleeping I expect from you, I admit.”  
  
Think faster, Charles demanded of himself. Think of _something_. Anything, through the pain. Sebastian only knew about the kisses. Not Erik, not the political activism; not even that Charles had made it out of the palace…  
  
“Well,” he managed, wishing his vision would stop blurring into hazy rainbows, “I am…seventeen…and probably not going to get much experience…otherwise…”  
  
And Sebastian—thank God, thank every God in the history of Westchester and the entire world—laughed. “I do remember being seventeen, Charles. And you…poor invalid you…of course you feel as if you’re missing out. But you should have told me. I’d’ve arranged it for you. Who was it, by the way? I can’t imagine you’d seduce a random housemaid, or one of the pages; they’re a bit young even for you. Did you send Doctor McCoy out to acquire you a whore?”  
  
Charles hoped desperately that Hank had the good sense not to look horrified, and whispered, “Not him…he only said he knew how to…other physicians use a particular, ah…”  
  
“Brothel? Oh, don’t be shocked, I know the word. And at least one assumes if the practitioners at Queen’s are in attendance, the girls must be clean enough. Though, as I recall, you prefer boys, don’t you, Charles? That stableboy, what was his name…”  
  
“Gabriel.” One more heavy black toll in the list. All the lives Sebastian’d crushed. It was an effort just getting out the name.  
  
“Mmm. Yes. Angelic. His mother cried very prettily, when he was…sent home, let’s say. Seduction of the Crown Prince. Attempted treason. Hideous crime. I can forgive you, this time, I think.” Sebastian got up, in a tidy rustle of satin. Plain fabrics, but priceless, every yard. Charles lay still among the pillows. Tried not to hope.  
  
Sebastian turned back, at the doorway into the other room. Smiled. The guardsmen were still holding Hank and Raven in place. Creed had a pistol drawn.  
  
“You did lie to me,” Sebastian said. “I can forgive you, and I can understand why, but really, Charles, if you’re going to pretend to be sicker than you are, at least do so convincingly. I _am_ insulted. And you can’t be permitted to get away with _that_.”  
  
The flick of the bell summoned a page; another girl, but not Kitty. Sebastian gave her low-voiced instructions; she bolted off, with a frightened look at the bed. Sebastian leaned against the fireplace mantel, waiting, and ran a finger over it, idly checking for dust.  
  
Sebastian’s own physician—on retainer, of course, because they needed a second opinion when it came to matters of the Heir’s health, naturally, _everyone_ had agreed when the Regent had said so—came in whistling. He had a cart, and equipment, wires and straps and what looked like a battery. Charles blinked, tried to make sense of it, and then thought, without any real conscious comprehension, understanding without knowing, no.  
  
Oh God no. He _did_ know, as the sight sank in. He’d read about all those experiments, new applications of that technology. Galvanism. Electric stimulation. Induced seizures.  
  
“Good evening, Charles,” Doctor Essex said, and beamed at him. Charles said, “No,” and tried to sit up, forgetting that he really shouldn’t be able to, forgetting everything except that battery and those metal rods; and Creed pointed his pistol at Hank, and Charles stopped trying to move.  
  
“This is quite new,” Sebastian observed, “Nathaniel was telling me about it over supper, yesterday, all the therapeutic benefits of electrical energy, recent developments with alternating current, and of course I’d spare no expense where your health is concerned,” and Charles wanted to whisper the no again but his voice had run away someplace and was hiding itself from the reality.  
  
“I might suggest that you drink this first,” the doctor said, and handed over the laudanum bottle. “Muscle relaxant, you understand.”  
  
Charles wondered, looking at the square dark glass, whether he could drink enough to feel nothing at all. He made an effort in that direction, at least.   
  
Hank was saying, “No, no, wait, he’s not strong enough for—his heart isn’t—and that’s for psychological cases, neurosis, schizophrenia, Charles isn’t insane, he’s perfectly rational, please don’t, please stop, you’re a _fucking doctor_ —” and Charles thought vaguely that Hank must be very afraid, because Hank never used profanity, and then shut his eyes because he couldn’t keep them open, couldn’t watch Raven trying to kick and punch and fight her way past the guards, and there was a pistol crack, and Raven screaming, and Sebastian saying dismissively, “It’s just her leg, get on with things…”  
  
The world had gone wholly dim and foggy with drugs, and he couldn’t protest while Essex came over and fussed about rods and restraints, and he couldn’t move while hands wandered across his skin. His body didn’t feel like his. The rain drummed away ceaselessly, blurring into nonstop meaningless sound.  
  
He thought, very clearly: someone’s going to have to tell Erik it might be more than three days, I’m sorry, I’m pretty sure I’m imagining it but I can still taste blueberries and laughter in the storm, and, Erik, I love you.  
  
Someone somewhere hit a switch. Someone else screamed. The world went away.


	6. bruised peaches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the aftermath is bad. In which Erik holds Charles's hand. In which Logan is Logan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay! Life, and other distractions...I do have an outline, though, and I know where it's going, I promise. :-)

Charles had said three days, and so Erik set the stall up in the market the following morning with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. He did not particularly want to be there, on a damp soggy morning clouded over with the grumbling remains of yesterday’s tempest; but he had a cover identity, and he had a job to do in that identity, so he did it.   
  
Besides, the palace cooks and stewards had begun coming down to pick up ripe kiwi or creamy coconut or sharp sweet dragonfruit. He had a reputation, it seemed, for quality and rareness.   
  
Which was fine. If those palace cooks purchased anything of his, Emma would be happy; more importantly, those flavors might get back to Charles. Might make blue eyes smile, across apricot-sauce venison or orange jellies and cream, thinking of him.   
  
He wondered what Charles was doing, this rainy morning. Pictured that sapphire gaze bent over a book, a microscope, an article for the _Times_. Eloquent fingers making notes. Dark hair in his eyes, and ink on his thumb. A cup of tea, perhaps, in bed, with blankets providing protection from the storm-cold air.   
  
He hoped that Charles was sitting up and ink-speckled and sipping tea in bed, because the alternative was Charles lying in that bed drugged and exhausted and unable to breathe, the same desperate struggles Erik’d heard once already and never wanted to hear again, that face white under all the freckles…   
  
He caught himself glancing in the direction of the palace towers, where they lurked like sea-creatures in the fog.   
  
The streetlamps glowed, eerily orange against the grey. They made small demonic circles of hell in the mist.   
  
Erik put a peach into an over-full basket. His hand slipped, only a fraction, and the entire basket emptied itself onto the ground. The peaches scattered, bruised and dismayed.    
  
All his senses crackled, uneasy. He didn’t know why.   
  
He only knew there _was_ something wrong, there _had_ to be, and the electricity of the glowering abeyant thunderstorm made the fine hairs along his arm stand on end.   
  
He knelt. Found his pack, found the tiny concealable handgun in it, weighed the metal in his palm.   
  
He didn’t have a plan. More accurately, he did have a plan, and it was a very simple plan: find Charles. He could, they could, come back for Shaw later. Now, first and foremost, Charles.    
  
He didn’t know what he’d say, what explanations he could give. I’ve been lying to you all along and I’m with the revolutionaries and I love you and here’s an extra-sweet golden pear because I thought you’d be interested in the new strain and I’m sorry. I think I love you and I’m sorry. I promise not to lie to you again, I wanted to tell you, I’ve wanted to tell you, I’ll keep you safe even if you hate me for this, and I love you, and I’m sorry.   
  
He had to try. Couldn’t do nothing.   
  
He stood up again, gun tucked neatly under his shirt, and saw the man on the other side of the table.   
  
The man was short and hirsute and possessed of extremely silently persuasive muscles. Dressed in the uniform of a Captain of the Royal Guard. Arms crossed.   
  
Erik tensed, poised for the fight. If the Regent’s guardsmen knew who he was, what he was doing—   
  
But they’d’ve sent more than one man. And the man looked worried, looked as if he might be internally passing judgment on Erik or the imported bananas, looked on edge; but wasn’t pulling a handgun. Yet. “Erik Lehnsherr?”   
  
“Yes.” No point in denying it; they—the man and whoever’d sent him—obviously knew. “Is there a problem?”   
  
“You’re the guy who’s…friends…with Charles? The Heir?” _Friends_ isn’t the word, proclaimed the man’s expression; but not with animosity. Given that, Erik ventured cautiously, “We are…acquainted…though I don’t believe he’s spoken of you,” and got a laugh, short and sharp and painful. “Chuck keeps cards too damn close to his chest. Kept. Keeps. I don’t know. Why I’m here; name’s Logan, and I taught him how to fight with those knives. Henry McCoy said to find you.”   
  
“Kept,” Erik said. “Past tense. You said—what happened?” His chest felt numb. His entire body felt numb. Cold. Too late. Charles. No.   
  
“Fuckin’ Sebastian happened.” Logan pulled out a cigar, looked at it, shook his head, put it away. “Chuck got me these last year. Expensive as hell, and I never did figure out how he guessed it was my birthday, ’cause I don’t exactly throw a party. I’ll tell you on the way.”   
  
They walked through the market square. Down the King’s Road. In the grey. Behind them, back at the fruit-stall, two other guards materialized like smoke; Logan grunted, “They’ll keep an eye on your stuff,” and Erik nodded because that should probably matter and then said, “Charles,” because that was all that did matter. And Logan told him.   
  
Erik managed one more step, and then had to put a hand on the wall of the dilapidated pub beside them, not so much for support as to feel a solid piece of the world.    
  
“He was alive when I left.” Logan stopped walking too. “McCoy knows more about it, what they did, I didn’t get details, I’m not a doctor. He said someone needed to find you. I volunteered.”   
  
“Alive.” The disintegrated shards of the world were coalescing anew. Turning hard and furious beneath his feet. Power. He could use that rage.   
  
Shaw had hurt Charles. For that, as for so many other crimes, Shaw would pay.   
  
But Charles might not be there to see it. And Erik’s heart felt hollow at the idea. As if victory would mean nothing without blue eyes at his side. As if vengeance wouldn’t be enough.   
  
Of course it wouldn’t. Of course. But if Charles died then he’d only have the vengeance left to cling to.   
  
“Still alive, yeah.” Logan kicked a loose cobblestone with a boot. It skipped away and vanished into the grimy fog. The City, in crumbling glory. “Don’t know for how long. He hasn’t woken up since. McCoy was tryin’ to give him water, last I saw. Somethin’, anyway.”   
  
Erik breathed a few words, most of them blasphemous, all of them angry over a core of fierce horrified love, and it was love, and he knew it was. His hand curled itself into a fist, over weather-worn stone.   
  
“Yeah,” Logan said, and their eyes met. “Yeah.”   
  
“How can I get in?” He was certain a random merchant couldn’t simply stroll through the doors. The Regent hadn’t bothered with common-folk audiences in years.    
  
“I’ll get you in. Guard gate, round the back. Chuck’s got his own way in and out, but he never taught it to any of us. This’ll only work once, though, half my guards report everything to Sebastian anyway. Any new face, especially.” Logan’s tone expressed quite clearly what he thought of that. “You go in, he’ll know who you are. Still coming?”   
  
For all its casual delivery, that question carried a sting at the end. Erik breathed, evenly, and said, “Yes.”   
  
For Charles, yes. His skin prickled, and the fine hairs along his arms didn’t like it, but yes.    
  
Logan grunted once more—begrudgingly impressed, Erik thought, insofar as he could read the wordlessness—and steered them toward a side gate in the behemoth’s walls, not a large entrance but one kept military-neat and smartly barred. The two men on duty glanced at Logan, at Erik, at each other.   
  
“He’s with me,” Logan said, “inspecting rations,” and walked in. Erik tried for an appropriately inspectorial expression. It was difficult, with every atom of his body screaming _Charles._   
  
The guardhouse looked like guardhouses everywhere—weapons-racks, benches, someone’s shield tossed idly into a corner—but tension hovered in the air like the scent of gunpowder. The guards knew about the revolutionaries. Loyalties twisting between City and Regent, fear and an oath to protect. Waiting to explode.    
  
Erik followed Logan, and tried to commit all the details of situation and armaments to memory—the Brotherhood would need to know—and thought only: Charles.   
  
Logan took him along one of the slender bridges to the inner keep, delicate collapsible wheel-spokes designed to snap in the event of a breach in the outer wall, and through another side door, and up and down enough back staircases that Erik began to wonder whether Logan’d gotten him deliberately lost, and then out into an empty old-fashioned carpeted hall.   
  
“Sorry ’bout the long way. I don’t need people wonderin’ what we’re doin’ up here. Not like Chuck needs a weapons-master right now. Here, turn right. Third door.” The door resembled any other palace door, thick wood and no doubt centuries old; Logan knocked, waited, knocked again in a slightly different rhythm, and the door swung wide.   
  
“You found him? Hello, you must be Erik, thank you, Logan, come in—” Young, Erik thought. Young and nervous and brave. Wearing a physician’s coat like a safety blanket, along with deeply unhappy eyes. McCoy, then. Henry. Hank.   
  
When he took the step in, the rooms _felt_ like Charles. Erik took note of that somewhere in the back of his head. Even at the first footfall, the space said _home_ to all his senses. The leaping crackle of flame in the fireplace. The scents of leatherbound books and sweetened tea. The glint of light from a microscope on a table littered with notes. Chairs plainly made for curling up into. And the distressed patter of rain on the windows.   
  
None of it was important. Not now. Not if Charles could never read one of those books or peer into that microscope, ever again.   
  
The edge of a bed was visible in the other room, through a half-shut door. He turned that way. McCoy and Logan fell into step behind him, silent.   
  
Charles lay in that bed. Under the window. Unmoving. His face was white and slack and bandaged, two small dressings at his temples. One hand lay over blankets, limp.   
  
Charles was as still as death. No. No, that was the worst simile, the most wrong, the most inaccurate, had to be—   
  
Charles didn’t move. Didn’t stir, as Erik sank to the floor, kneeling at the side of the bed. For a heart-freezing second Erik couldn’t tell whether he was breathing. But the motion was present, faint intimations of up and down.    
  
_ Erik _ might not be breathing, now. He wasn’t certain he could stand. The anguish pulled at him like terrible gravity, inescapable, cataclysmic.   
  
“Charles,” he said, because he had to say something, had to try, couldn’t not try. “Charles.”   
  
Henry McCoy came over. Dragged a second chair to the side of the bed; its legs caught helplessly in the rug. “Here. Talk to him. He might hear you.”   
  
“Might.”   
  
“Might, yes.” McCoy shut both eyes, then opened them, exhaustedly. “I don’t know. I don’t even know you. God, I’m tired.”   
  
Logan, who’d been looking fixedly at Charles, said, “ ’less you need me for anything else, Hank, I’m gonna go shoot some practice targets with Shaw’s face on them for a few hours.”   
  
“Be tactful,” Hank said, “we don’t need you getting killed on top of everything else,” and Logan grimaced. “Raven still in the infirmary?”   
  
“Yes. Sebastian offered to leave us Victor Creed as a bodyguard. I declined.”   
  
Erik, only half-listening, storing sentences to go through later, picked up Charles’s hand. Charles did not respond. His skin was cold. His eyes were closed, all that laughing blue hidden away.   
  
But, Erik said soundlessly, but I love you, I’m here, please don’t leave me, I’ve come for you, please come back to me; and turned that hand in his, rubbing a thumb over the pale traceries of fragile veins beneath soft skin.   
  
Logan offered to send up someone called Marie from the barracks. Hank accepted. Logan said, “Tell Chuck, when he wakes up, that I’m running out of cigars,” and made a hasty exit, in the manner of a weapons-master refusing to shed tears anywhere but a deserted hall.   
  
Hank fell into the other chair. Gazed at Charles, at Erik; ran hands through his hair, and breathed out. “So. You’re Charles’s…Erik. I’m sorry about sending Logan. I couldn’t leave him.”   
  
_ Him,  _ of course, meant Charles. Erik nodded. He wasn’t leaving either.   
  
“Well, you came,” Hank said, and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “I probably approve of you but I’ve been awake since yesterday morning and at this point I don’t even know what I’m saying. He told me he loves you, you know. I don’t know who you are or how you feel about him, but maybe it’ll matter. Thank you.”   
  
“He…said…what?”   
  
“I know, I know, Charles always does jump in too fast. He sees the good, when he looks at people.” Hank watched Charles’s chest rise and fall. One breath. Two. “I don’t mean he’s naïve. He just decides, every day, to treat people like they’re decent inside. Like he can save the world if he believes in it hard enough. And then this. I hope you’re worth it.”   
  
“I’m not,” Erik said. He meant it. A revolutionary, a commoner, a liar, a man who’d killed before and was planning to kill again. He knew what he was. He also knew that he would lose Charles, good and kind and heroic Charles, the second he said so to blue eyes. But he would also fight for Charles, and stay here at Charles’s side, because he was selfish enough to take it all while he could, to be Charles’s hero if he had the chance, and he was in love enough to not care about the hurt to himself when Charles inevitably looked at him with disappointment.   
  
If Charles could look at him. If Charles could awaken at all.   
  
“I’m not worth it,” he said again. “I don’t deserve him. But I love him. If it matters.”   
  
Hank shrugged, weary. “It matters to me. Charles wants you, for whatever reason, and he’s my friend. But will it make a difference? I don’t know. I’ve barely managed to get water into him. Not enough. How much did Logan tell you about what happened?”   
  
“He said…Shaw’s doctor…something about electricity…he didn’t know the details. Are those burns?”    
  
“Under the bandages, yes. Erik—is that all right? Erik?—okay, good.” Hank looked at Charles, and looked away from Charles, pain written in every line of his face. “You need to know—you’ll have to be prepared. For what might happen if—when— _when_ he wakes up.”   
  
Erik, letting his expression demand the answers, held Charles’s hand. Waited.   
  
Hank swallowed. “Do you know when electric shock treatment’s normally employed?”   
  
“No.”   
  
“Oh…well…it’s been tried on…it’s still new, experimental, but…schizophrenia patients. The ones who have no other hope, who—it’s been used in hospitals. In mad-houses.” And then, swiftly, not inexplicably because the guilt and misery were audibly weighing down every syllable, “I’m sorry.”   
  
Charles, Erik thought. Hank should be sorry. Hank, and the missing bodyguard Raven, and Logan, and anyone who’d failed to protect Charles, and Erik himself most of all, Erik who’d let him back into the palace and away from Erik’s ferocious side….   
  
He’d not _let_ Charles do anything. Charles made his own choices. _Had_ made.   
  
“You said I’d need to be prepared.” Calm. Like a veneer of granite: grey, unyielding, giving no quarter and hiding chasms beyond. “For what do I need to be prepared?”   
  
“This…it’s not meant for this.” With anger both personal and professional distorting that physician’s voice. “Charles is healthy—mentally, I mean—he’s perfectly sane, but he’s not well otherwise, his heart—I don’t know. No one’s done this, these circumstances, before. But I do know there are usually some…effects…associated with memory. I _am_ sorry.”   
  
The words took a second to sink in. To burn home. And then Erik felt the impact. The dry fire in his chest. “You’re saying he won’t remember me.”   
  
“Not exactly.” Thinned lips, eyes grieving, fatigued. Dark smudges like bruises. Actual bruises, from the fists of Shaw’s guards. Logan had said as much, had said both Hank and the absent Raven’d been injured in the fight to make it stop. “He’ll know who you are. He’ll know he knows you. Short-term memory’s the most susceptible; we don’t know why, precisely, only that it’s something to do with the way the brain stores data. He almost certainly won’t remember Sebastian being here. He likely won’t remember me asking how he got those little love-bites, which, by the way, he’ll tell you he’s stronger than he is, and don’t listen—”   
  
Stronger. Yes. Charles was stronger than anyone knew. But that was a different kind of strength.   
  
“—and anyway it doesn’t matter, it may not matter, I’m not going to tell you it’s a good sign that he won’t wake up—he _might_ remember what you were doing. Before he came home. But I wouldn’t hope for that.” Hank stopped. Took a deep breath. He wasn’t good at controlling his tone. Not like Erik, who’d mastered control years ago, whose control was the only thing keeping him from screaming with rage and turning the palace inside-out with destruction and putting a bullet _through Sebastian Shaw’s fucking_ _eye_ —   
  
“Sebastian wanted to hurt him,” Hank said, while Erik thought of pistols and knives and poison and throwing Charles over his shoulder and carrying him away, someplace safe, someplace tropical-warm and pillow-soft and kind, where no sizzling sparks would ever shatter his brain again, never, not ever, not while Erik was alive.   
  
“So,” Hank started, and then simply didn’t go on, having run out of words, no sounds or syllables left to encompass the breaking of the universe.    
  
“So,” Erik said, and breathed, in and out, thinking of knives, holding Charles’s unmoving hand. “What can I do?” There had to be something. There must be something left to do. Anything.    
  
“Stay with him. Talk to him. Some recovering coma patients have reported awareness of their surroundings. This is…not the same, but…you can try.” Hank glanced at the sofa in the other room. “If I take a nap, an hour or so…I trust you, or at least I trust Charles, so I suppose I trust you, kind of a mathematical principle…wake me up if anything happens. If he breathes differently. If you just think he’s breathing differently. Anything.”   
  
“Of course.”   
  
“One hour,” Hank sighed, and wobbled off to fall onto Charles’s sofa. Erik sat there with the water-pitcher and the rain pouring unchecked down the thick medieval-glass windows. He looked at Charles’s face. Studied closed eyelids, memorized the placement and shape of the two irregular freckles on his nose, traced the curve of his lips like the swoop of a painting. The scrutiny did nothing; Charles did not wake.   
  
A clock sat on the bookshelf near the bed. It ticked placidly, back and forth, measured as doom. Erik wanted to scream.   
  
Talk to him, Hank’d said. Maybe.   
  
“I love you,” he said to those closed eyes. “I should have told you. I wanted to tell you. I am in love with you, Charles.” The words felt good. They felt right. They went unheard.   
  
He said, while the rain wept into puddles and threw itself from eaves, “The first day we met you talked about strawberries. About theories of hybridization, and feeding the world. And I thought you were ridiculous, and too optimistic to be real, and I wanted to kiss you.”   
  
He should have done it, then. He should have kissed Charles every time he’d had the chance.    
  
He told Charles stories, holding on. About a night he’d slept under the stars on his way to Westchester, a night he’d looked up and seen the whole infinite glittering universe flung out above him like diamonds on blue silk, numinous and distant and bright. He’d felt, if not happy, at least not alone, under those stars. Weightless, just for a moment, relieved of care.   
  
He told Charles that. Talked about pineapple for a while, and promised fresh ones, delivered every day. Asked Charles, who did not answer, whether he liked science-fiction; and if he’d read the new novel by the man named Wells, about time and the end of the universe and what humanity might become.   
  
He let Hank sleep, and tried giving Charles water, tipping a spoon between lax lips. Most of it spilled out.   
  
The day turned into night. The storm did not abate. Hank woke up enough to send for food, delivered by a tragic-eyed page called Kitty, who pressed the tray into Hank’s hands while trying not to cry. Hank hugged her, and gave her the pastry swan from the pudding.   
  
Charles, alive, did not move. Hank shook his head, watching already fair skin grow paler, once-bright lips crack. The world narrowed down to the three of them, and a water-pitcher and a bed, and the lightning outside.   
  
Other concerns existed. Emma Frost, the Brotherhood, the damned fruit-stall. Erik, in those hours, did not forget, but chose, and refused to second-guess his choice. Charles needed him. This was a fight, too, right here in the Prince’s domesticated-wild-library apartments, and Erik was good at fighting.   
  
Logan came by at unpredictable intervals. He helped them change sheets, the second time, and told Hank that Raven was awake, in the infirmary, and demanding to be allowed up the stairs; the Regent had personally forbidden this, out of concern for her health, because surely Charles’s favorite bodyguard needed to recover. Logan said this with heavy irony, and the third time he came by warned them that Sebastian was sending Victor Creed to check in. Erik, concealed pistol heavy at his back, ducked unwillingly into a wardrobe and thanked the deity he no longer believed in that Charles owned a hell of a lot of formal robes.   
  
Creed smirked at Charles, grunted at Hank, and left, presumably to make his report. Hank sat down, shaking. Erik emerged from a tangle of cerulean silk and velvet sleeves, and snapped, “I am not doing that again.”   
  
“Or what, you’re going to take on the head of Sebastian’s personally-selected palace guard detail with your bare hands?” Hank snorted inelegantly. “Good luck.”   
  
I have a gun and more brains in my little finger than Creed apparently has in his head, Erik did not say, and instead came back to the side of the bed, following the arch of Charles’s cheekbone with a single finger, heart crumpling.   
  
Hank got up as well. And the unsaid words then were bleak, and black, and defeated.   
  
“No,” Erik said. And attempted yet again to get Charles to swallow water. Hank, after a minute, took the pitcher and rang for Kitty to get it refilled.   
  
Nothing had changed by the second morning except a momentary break in the storm. Erik, startled by the single watery sunbeam, had looked at Charles’s face, as if the two might be connected, as if the yielding of the weather might lead to open eyes.   
  
Stupid to think so. Not a fairy-tale. And the clouds closed ranks again shortly in any case.   
  
He was holding Charles’s hand again, voice scratchy with too much use, half-drowsing. He’d been talking about his mother. He’d said that she would have liked Charles. It was true. She’d no doubt have tried to feed him and clothe him in warm sweaters and wool.   
  
He’d lost her. And he was losing Charles. And he needed to fight for them both, needed to be strong, and he was so tired and so angry and so tired of needing to be angry.   
  
He loved Charles. That was something, one brilliant spot, besides the anger. But even that hurt. Because he was losing the fight.   
  
He let his eyes slip shut, and shoved them open again.   
  
And Charles’s fingers moved, in his.   
  
Erik froze. Imagination. Had to be. Surely not now, now after everything. He couldn’t even call for Hank, because it couldn’t be real.   
  
Charles’s fingers stirred again. So did long eyelashes, fluttering, not quite lifting.   
  
“Charles,” Erik whispered.   
  
Hank sat up, on the sofa, and then swung legs to the ground.   
  
Charles opened his eyes, looked up, and held Erik’s gaze with his own.   
  
The clouds clustered around the windowpane in joy, and Hank was running over, and Erik said again, “Charles,” through the shaky joy, breathless and tremulous with it.   
  
Charles’s lips shaped what looked like Erik’s name, and Erik said, “I’m here,” and Charles managed a tiny smile, and then started to cry.   
  
Hank, diving in with desperately professional competence, checking his pulse, pulling out the stethoscope, demanded, “Charles, can you talk, do you know who you are, can you tell me what’s wrong?”   
  
“It hurts,” Charles whispered, still crying, not trying to hold back the tears. Not trying to talk. Only free-falling tattered sobs. The repeated “it hurts,” broken and lost, rationality drowned in pain.   
  
Erik looked up, across his head. Saw the possibility in Hank’s anguished gaze, black as winter ice, black like the only hue left in the world, if it were true.   
  
He’d hold Charles forever. He’d love Charles forever. Even if Charles could never love him back, because Charles was gone, no trace of that genius mind left in the wake of vicious electric scourging.   
  
That was true, too.   
  
But Charles blinked back tears, shuddering, and added, “Sorry…I can’t think…yes, I know my name…and yours, Hank…oh, God, my head…”   
  
Hank now looked immensely relieved, so much so that the expression only drew attention to what he must’ve been thinking seconds before. “Okay. We can handle that, I’ll get you something, I know you hate laudanum but I think for this you need it, nothing else’s that strong, okay? I want you to look at me first. Do you know where you are?”   
  
Charles blinked. “…my room?”   
  
“Here,” Erik said, offering water. Charles took a sip out of the cup, when it was lifted to his lips, Erik’s other hand behind his head for support. “Thank you. Wait…why are you…how are you here…am I not awake?”   
  
“It’s me,” Erik told him, “I had to bring you pineapple in person, you didn’t show up on time,” and Charles started laughing, and then started crying again, in agony, but reached for him, and so Erik bent down and kissed him, not forceful or drawn-out, only a meeting of lips with lips because there was no other choice just then.   
  
Charles tasted like fresh cool water and tears and pain, and like himself, like the other half of Erik’s lonely soul. Charles kissed him back, startled and weak and sweet, and through the clouds the sun peeked out again and cheered.   
  
“Stop that,” Hank said, and Erik already was, no demands, nothing that might cause further harm; but he wrapped his long fingers around Charles’s shorter freckled ones, after.   
  
“Oh…” Charles sounded breathless, amazed, awestruck. Erik felt it too. All around. Inside his bones.   
  
And then Charles added, “So…rather dramatic circumstances for a first kiss, but I’m hardly complaining, that was…” At which point he trailed off, looking at Erik’s face. “Erik?”   
  
No words. Numbness. He’d been warned. He thought he’d been prepared.    
  
He’d allowed himself an instant of hope. And now his heart was busy folding in on itself inside his chest. Crumpled up and flyaway and brittle. He clung to Charles’s fingers. He couldn’t let go.   
  
“All right…” Charles glanced at both of their dismayed faces. “Before you give me anything that puts me back to sleep…which I want, mind you, my head’s about to explode…why’ve I got the distinct impression I’m missing something important?”   
  
Erik couldn’t talk. Charles gazed at him, crease slowly forming between tugged-together brows. “Erik…”   
  
“Charles,” Hank said, each word heavy as cannon-fire, portentous and inevitably cruel, “what’s the last thing you remember?”   
  
Charles put his head on one side. A lip-bite, a squeeze—possibly unconscious, potentially not—of Erik’s hand. “I…went out…I went out to see you. Erik, I mean. I did see you; I remember being in the market, and—blueberries? And you caught me, when I couldn’t stand—”   
  
“What,” Hank said.   
  
“I did,” Erik said, “I did, I will, I always will, Charles, please—” and he didn’t know what he was asking for, he only knew he had to say it, had to say: please know that, please believe it, I’m here, I’m here, I love you.   
  
Charles held his hand, and said, “I know,” and Erik lifted those fingertips and kissed them, and Charles smiled. “I think…that’s the last memory, the last clear one, you holding me. I thought I was all right…was I…not? That doesn’t seem right, though…something about tea, and then I was in the treasury…”   
  
“The treasury?” Hank frowned, eyebrows fretful. “Before you got back here—no, never mind. You need to rest. And to eat something. Actually, eat this first. It’s been two days.”   
  
“Two _days?_ ” Charles’s voice splintered in surprise, disused and astounded. Hank paused before handing over another scrap of bread, waiting. “What happened…oh, God, _ow,_ Hank—”   
  
“Right,” Hank said, “you, drugs, now,” and unearthed a laudanum bottle from his bag. “Only a quarter dose. More if you need it. This…Sebastian was here. And Essex. And…Charles…don’t touch those bandages, please…electricity. Shock therapy.”   
  
Charles’s face went white. More so. A scientist knowing precisely the depth of the words. “Oh. Oh, God. No wonder I feel…wait, Hank, where’s Raven, don’t tell me Sebastian—”   
  
“She’s okay. Creed shot her—in the leg, just in the leg, she’s fine, it’s a clean wound—she’s in the infirmary.” Hank held the spoon to lips; Charles obediently swallowed, and shut his eyes. “She wants to see you. Sebastian won’t allow it. Charles, I’m sorry.”   
  
“Don’t.” Charles held out the other hand, the one not being claimed by Erik. “I know you tried. Even if I can’t remember. I know you did.”   
  
Hank swallowed, nodded, squeezed the hand awkwardly, let go. “Thanks. Um. Sleep. It’ll help, actually, the brain can do a lot of healing if you give it a chance. You might not get all of those memories back—self-defense, sort of, blocking out trauma—but you might get some. Especially if you, um, have…familiar objects…around.”   
  
Charles, even half-dead and slipping into the reprieve of drugs, managed a grin and a pointed glance at Erik. Erik tried not to cry. He did not entirely succeed, but he did say, “If I have to kiss you again, Charles, I won’t mind at all, I promise you.”   
  
“My familiar object,” Charles whispered, and slid into sleep with a fading smile and lines of pain around his eyes.    
  
And it was real, if assisted, slumber this time. Healing. Safe. The bravest sunbeam danced through the window, plunged into a prism on a writing desk, and flung scattered rainbows around the room.   
  
“He’s all right,” Hank said, and ran a hand through his hair, and exhaled like the lifting of the universe. “He’ll be all right.”   
  
“Of course he will,” Erik said, not letting go, letting the words be true. They’d won. Charles had won. With him there. Charles might be wounded, terribly so; might never recall that glorious ecstatic first kiss, the taste of hot tea and the drumming exuberance of the rain and laughter in a deserted alley. But Erik remembered, and could carry that moment for the both of them.    
  
He’d not said the _I love you_ to Charles. He’d forgotten. But he thought Charles knew. Charles, who was himself despite the worst Sebastian Shaw could do, who worried about his own bodyguard and reassured Hank and kissed Erik back willingly, wholeheartedly, wonderfully. Unhesitating, even when as far as blue eyes knew that had to be a first-ever kiss. The way that Charles always would throw himself into every cause, giving of himself without reservation, once committed.    
  
Charles slept, and Erik held his hand. And thought about commitment, and what he’d fight for, die for, protect with his life. Not only a what; not only a cause. A who. Ocean-spray eyes and the ghostly hint of a teasing smile.    
  
So many unanswered questions. He was only tiredly tactically speculating, diffuse stray considerations wandering in and out. Loose threads in his mind. Why had Charles stopped by the treasury? How could the revolution deploy newly gained information about the dissatisfied rumblings amid palace guards, about a weapons-master with no love for the Regent? How _did_ Charles get in and out of the palace, that secret no one else knew?   
  
Erik’d never had divided loyalties. His path had been clear ever since Shaw’d laughed and killed his mother and walked away, army-commander footsteps crunching in Genoshan snow. He’d joined the Brotherhood because the revolution offered a chance at Shaw. He wanted Shaw dead.   
  
He wanted Charles alive. He thought about choices, and where he’d stand if he had to take a stand, and what he’d choose. And he thought that maybe he already had, being here in the palace, being _here;_ and that thought hurt like searing fire, but in a good way, like cleansing a wound. They’d won this battle. Pulled Charles back from the brink. Victory. Triumph over the knife’s-edge of dread.   
  
He wanted Shaw dead, but he was here instead, holding dreaming fingers in his, not taking his gun and stalking into the throne room and aiming and letting bullets fly. Because Charles was here, and alive.    
  
The future would come. Shaw would be there, and Shaw would die. Certainties, those. And so, given that, Erik could wait. Today, surrounded by giddy sunbeam-rainbows and the scents of scholarly parchment and serene steeping tea, he could hold Charles’s hand, and think _I love you,_ and call it, yes, a victory.


	7. spiced pears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is some comfort, some unspoken words, Logan being Logan, Erik being talked out of very bad decisions, and a broom closet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay! And for the cliffhanger! This chapter was the first half of a much longer chapter, but I thought it was about time to post SOMETHING... I do have Plans. And ideally the rest will be faster.

Charles slept, rather anticlimactically, much of the following day. Erik did not, though at one point, under orders from Hank McCoy, he tried. He’d not wanted to. Charles’s physician had raised eyebrows and said, “You think he’ll thank you for exhausting yourself watching over him? I’ll wake you up in four hours,” and Erik had meant to pretend to close his eyes but ended up collapsing into uneasy dreams the second he stretched out on the plush brocade sofa in the sitting room.   
  
Hank woke him—true to his word, four hours to the second, and Erik observed this with begrudging approval—and said before Erik could open his mouth, “He’s fine. Still asleep.” Erik breathed out evenly, and went back to sit in the chair beside the satin-coverlet bed.   
  
Charles looked small, looked pale. Had angry tiny burns—the marks of electrodes—over both temples. They’d scar, though they’d not be large.    
  
Charles, Erik thought, was the strongest person he knew; the wayward strands of dark hair falling innocently over one closed eye were deceptive. Charles lived with Sebastian Shaw every day. Charles snuck out of the palace and wrote incendiary articles for the _Times_. Charles spoke to fruit-merchants and newspaper publishers and violet-sellers and mudlarks in the streets.    
  
Charles _was_ the strongest person Erik knew. Stronger than Erik himself; he could admit that in the privacy of his own head. Charles remembered how to smile. Charles made Erik, who’d thought he’d forgotten, want to remember how to smile.   
  
Charles woke with a tiny gasp of pain and a lost look in blue eyes. Erik kissed his fingertips, inexplicably reminded that those fingertips were seventeen years old and technically underage, a handful of years younger than his own and equally determined. Steel under sunlight. Blazing.   
  
He said, “Still here,” and Charles relaxed, more so when Hank came into view as well. Hank brought willowbark tea and another quarter-dose of laudanum. Charles bit his lip, looking at the cup; Hank said gently, “You don’t have to, I’m not in your head, you know whether you can put up with how much it hurts right now,” and his expression stayed almost perfectly guarded against despair. Erik remembered that admission, cracking over Charles’s unconscious form: _no one’s done this before, not under these circumstances, he’ll tell you that he’s stronger than he is…_   
  
Charles hesitated. Erik said, “Would you be better off, strategically speaking, with this amount of pain, or that amount of drowsiness?” Charles sighed, and took the drugs. Erik and Hank traded glances across his head.   
  
“How _are_ you feeling?” Hank took his other hand, tested his pulse, paused to listen to his heart. “Dizziness? Any further memory loss? Or regained memories?”   
  
“Yes, no, and yes.” Charles, propped upright by pillows and Erik, dredged up a small smile from the wreckage. “Like having a truly terrible migraine…as far as memory, about the same. Maybe a bit more solid, some parts. Being in the market. Rain. Tea. Some disconnected pieces. Sebastian’s face. My father’s face, which I can only assume was an uninvited dream. Did I deliver the article I went out to leave? Did I tell you?”   
  
“You did, and you did.” Hank tilted Charles’s face with a professional hand, checking healing burns. “These look better. We’ll keep ointment on them, but you’ll heal fine.”   
  
“We,” Erik said. As if anyone other than himself and _possibly_ Hank would be allowed to touch Charles.   
  
“Thank you.” Charles leaned his head against Erik’s shoulder. “Also for the confirmation. I thought that moment was real, but I feel as if I can’t be sure. Can I see Raven?”   
  
“You can’t get up,” Hank said, “if that’s what you’re asking. And Sebastian’s keeping her…under observation. For her health, of course. But the pages say she’s all right. Furious, mostly.”   
  
Charles let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I feel so useless. Here in bed, drinking tea…I can’t even go out and see my bodyguard who’s been shot on my behalf…”   
  
“You nearly _died,_ ” Hank said. Erik did not say anything, because he was trembling between two poles of emotion: the need to shout _I thought you were going to die, I thought you were dying while I held your hand, I thought you’d never open your eyes again, I love you_ and the understanding that, exactly like himself, Charles could never lie still and do nothing when there was a battle to be won.   
  
Charles glanced at his face. Then at Hank’s, which hid nothing; Erik wondered what his own looked like, how far into his heart Charles could see.   
  
The rain had let up as of that morning but not entirely vanished. Currently it was wrapping shimmering silken fingers around thick glass windows. Cradling the world in sparkles and grey cotton wool and sighs.   
  
“Well,” Charles said, lightness over emotion, “I seem to be alive, so—if you won’t let me get up, at least bring me a pen? I could write a beautifully scathing article for the _Times_ about the abuses of the medical profession.”   
  
“No exerting yourself,” Hank said, and swiped a hand over his eyes.   
  
Charles looked pathetically at Erik. Erik shrugged with the shoulder that wasn’t being support. “You could. You could also write it tomorrow.”   
  
“…fine,” Charles said, someplace between fond dismay and appreciation, “you can read to me.”   
  
Erik blinked. The rain billowed happily, encouraging him to offer comfort, to learn how to sit at the bedside of the man he loved and read quiet words instead of secret messages and blood.   
  
He reached over and picked up the topmost volume from the closest of the literary towers beside the bed. Charles smiled again. “Samuel Butler? You’ll probably like that one.”   
  
“ _Erewhon?_ Did he mean to write _nowhere_ backwards and fail?”   
  
“I am not even part of this discussion,” Hank said, looking happier, looking at Charles. “ _You_ can argue scientific fiction with him until the moon comes up. I’m going to ring for food,” and got up, heading to the other room.   
  
Charles laughed, a hint of apology in the sound, and a wince of pain at the end. “I can be very passionate about utopian satire.”   
  
“Hmm,” Erik said, and opened leatherbound pages. “So. When I left home, it was with the intention of going to some new colony…”   
  
Charles curled up against him and listened, drifting in and out of sleep. Prophets and the Colleges of Unreason and the evolution of machines. Darwinism and absurdity. The intelligence of rose-bushes. Erik shook his head, but found himself caught up in the imagination and irony regardless.    
  
The day slid into night amid stories and mist. Charles woke up enough for tea and toast and rosewater blancmange, and raised an eyebrow at the latter. Erik sympathized, and cornered Hank later with specific instructions to pass on to the castle pages and hence Logan, who had after all promised to take care of his imported goods.   
  
The second morning Charles woke to the drifting scent of spiced stewed pears, beaten into softness; not excessively rich or overdone, only faint sprinkles of cinnamon and nutmeg, but not bland invalid’s food. Erik watched blue eyes light up in comprehension. Felt his heart perform an unaccustomed spin in response.    
  
He wondered, bringing over the pot, whether that feeling would ever go away. He thought not, somehow. He wasn’t certain he liked it; but he didn’t dislike it, either. That would mean disliking Charles, and Erik could never, not ever, not even in the face of all the irritating optimism and royal privilege, dislike Charles.   
  
He held up a spoonful of cinnamon-vanilla-infused fruit puree. Charles regarded this gesture with some skepticism. “I am capable of feeding mys—”   
  
“Sorry,” Erik said, “didn’t catch that,” and Charles glared and swallowed. “You’re a terrible nurse.”   
  
“And you’re an extremely irritating patient.” He handed over the spoon. He knew how much he’d hate being treated as helpless; Charles’s fingers weren’t as steady as his own, but stable enough. “Better?”   
  
“Yes,” Charles said, smiling at the spoon, smiling at him. And one knee nudged Erik’s from beneath blanket-layers. “Better.”   
  
The moment extended into golden-pear sweetness. The clouds hovered breathless around stone palace walls. And all the unsaid words hung in the balance: I love you, I’m working with the revolutionaries, I have been all along, we’ve talked about dynamite and the death of Sebastian Shaw and the downfall of the monarchy behind your back, and I love you.   
  
Thumps broke into the silence. Pounding on the solid oak of the front door to Charles’s rooms. A certain rhythm, albeit more harried than usual.   
  
They both spun to look. Hank was already letting Logan in. “What—”   
  
“Shaw’s comin’ to check on you.” Logan ran a hand through his hair; he’d evidently run all the way from the practice grounds, from the state of his training uniform. “Your favorite baby conspirator—Kitty—she found me in the yard. You got maybe two minutes, he’s on his way up.”   
  
Hank went pale. Charles did too, but took a deep breath and said, “Thank you, Logan. All right—well, I’m obviously not well, we won’t even need to lie—can you get Erik out of here? Temporarily, Erik, only until he’s gone, I swear—”   
  
“No,” Erik said.   
  
“We don’t have the time to argue.” Charles stopped to breathe. The oasis was crumbling around them. Shredded morning gold. “Sebastian will bring bodyguards. There won’t be anything you can do except get us all killed. I’m sorry. That was cruel. But you know I’m not wrong.”   
  
“You’re hurt.” He barely recognized his own voice. Tortured between desires.   
  
“Yes.” Charles looked at him evenly. Erik remembered the first time they’d met, and his own thoughts: a boy who could command armies. Who could lead men into battle, men who’d follow blue eyes out of pure deserved loyalty and love. “I am. He’ll be pleased. And I won’t be much use to you in any kind of fight. There will be a time and a place, Erik, I know—I know you want to—you hate him. I _know_. But not now. Please.”   
  
Erik breathed out. In. Lifted fingers one by one away from the pistol in his belt. “What do you want us to do?”   
  
Charles looked at Logan; Logan shrugged. “Broom closet?”   
  
“What,” Erik said.   
  
“It’s not a bad idea,” Charles decided. “Down the hall, to the left? Out of his way? Hank can come and get you, after—”   
  
“Hank can send a page to get you,” Hank said. “Charles, this is not an idea I have good feelings about.”   
  
“I’ve lied to Sebastian before,” Charles pointed out. “I’ve been lying to Sebastian all along. And in this case I don’t even have to. Having no reliable memories may prove astonishingly useful after all.”   
  
Every other person in the room winced. Charles made an _I’m sorry but if I can’t who can?_ expression at them. “Go. Hank can stay. We’ll be fine.”   
  
“Charles,” Erik said, and kissed him; not hard, not demanding, but sweet and fierce and fruit-flavored, a promise of lips on lips.    
  
Charles kissed back with unprincely enthusiasm. Logan cleared his throat. “Chuck—”   
  
“Sorry,” Charles murmured in that direction, eyes not leaving Erik’s. “Go on.”   
  
And Erik found himself chasing the weapons-master down a deserted hallway, through a door, into a storage room; it was a broom closet in actual fact, mops and silver polish and dustpans on a shelf. The household accessories made astonished space for them in the lampless dimness; Logan fiddled with the lock and grunted in satisfaction. “ ’kay. Any maids’ll think it’s stuck.”   
  
“Are we?”   
  
“Nah.” For all that he was a head shorter than Erik, Logan managed to exude protective crankiness from every single shadowed stocky muscle. “I’ll get us out. Assumin’ I don’t learn somethin’ about you I don’t like. You stayed with him. You get points for that one. I don’t know anything about you, though, and my own best guards couldn’t find any trace of you before you turned up bein’ a fruit merchant in the market square, and ain’t that interestin’.”   
  
“You,” Erik said, hand tense around the grip of his pistol in the dark, “brought me to a broom closet to threaten me?”   
  
“Nope, I brought you to a broom closet to hide you from Sebastian Shaw, ’cause Chuck’s in love with you and I’d do a lot worse for that kid. Threatening you’s a bonus.”   
  
“I won’t hurt him. I won’t let _anyone_ hurt him.”   
  
“Not even you?”   
  
Erik, faced with this devastating insight, threw the arrow right back while bleeding out of the hole it’d left in his gut. “ _I_ haven’t let Sebastian Shaw strap electrodes to his head.”   
  
Logan hissed quietly between his teeth. “Watch it, bub.”   
  
“You—”   
  
“Shut up!”   
  
“Because—”   
  
“Because we ain’t havin’ this argument when Shaw’s bodyguards might hear us, now _shut up.”_   
  
Erik wanted to argue, wanted to punch Logan in the face for being so damn right about everything, wanted to run back to Charles’s rooms where the Regent would be arriving with a smug smile and G-d knew what plans to injure sapphire eyes more—   
  
He crossed his arms. Turned his back, and hated the ludicrous broom closet and the farce his life had become and himself for being weak.   
  
The mop to his left fell over for no apparent reason. He snapped a hand out and caught it before it could make any noise. It lay in his grip with innocuous gratitude.   
  
After an uncounted stretch of unlit agonizing time, Logan said, “Whatever it’s worth, I don’t think you’d hurt him on purpose.”   
  
“I thought you said we shouldn’t talk.”   
  
More silence. The scents of polish and boot-black. Bleach and vinegar for stains. For shirts and linens, not for souls.   
  
“I love him,” Erik said, not turning around, not able to turn around.   
  
“Yeah, and he loves you. It’s a damn pretty fairy-tale. The Prince and the whatever you are.”   
  
“Shaw’s going to hurt him. Isn’t he.”   
  
“Don’t know.” With the rustle of a shrug. “Shaw’s a bastard, and he hates Charles, but he’s not stupid. If Chuck dies the Regency goes right out the window. Pretty sure he’s got some plan in mind for next year, but not tomorrow. He’ll be careful.”   
  
_ “Careful.” _   
  
“Yeah. Only invisible bruises. Look, you don’t have to talk to me. But whatever you’re up to, tell Charles. He deserves to know if you’re gonna fuck this up. And he’ll probably even tell you to stay. Got a thing for hopeless causes, our Prince.”   
  
“He shouldn’t,” Erik said to the dark, to the mops, to Logan. He had been planning to tell Charles, was planning to tell Charles, and those plans were none at all of Logan’s business. “He’s going to trust the wrong person, and he’s going to _die.”_   
  
“Hey, you said you wouldn’t let anyone hurt him,” Logan said, and Erik turned around, and their eyes met, in perfect accord.   
  
No need for other words. They waited, surrounded by the incongruous castle-cleaning domesticity. They waited, knowing Charles was being hurt a hallway away, knowing that whatever happened in those rooms had to be in Charles’s hands, knowing Charles had told them to wait and hating it nevertheless. Erik kept his hand on his pistol, ears straining for that summoning knock, senses on alert, feeling his heart pound with every pulse through his veins. 


	8. the taste of orange marmalade on toast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which recovery, revelations, machinations, oral sex, and I-love-yous occur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, sorry, I know this took every kind of forever! Distracted by new courses to teach and Sebastian Stan's face! But I promise I have a Plan. And I think Plot Things will start happening more rapidly from here on out...

Back to Charles’s rooms. Summoned by the ever-helpful page-girl Kitty, who got out, “he’s fine—” before Erik shoved her aside—gently, gently, Charles wouldn’t appreciate manhandling of the children—and ran.  
  
Charles _was_ fine. For a given value, of course, of fine. Not well, but sitting up with the assistance of pillows and Hank McCoy. Watery uncertain sunshine spilled concern across the fine linens of the bed, the dyed rich wool blankets. And Charles smiled at him when Erik skidded through the door, heart slamming against furious ribs, pistol a comforting companion.  
  
“I’m all right,” Charles promised, holding out both hands. Erik took them, sinking onto the side of the bed. He could see new marks on Charles’s cheek, on that stubborn chin; not bruises but pinkness rushing to fill in white lines, as if fingers’d pressed too purposefully hard when nominally checking in, checking a pulse. He said, calmly factual, “I’m planning to kill him even more, for that,” and forced himself to not clench hands around the fragile ones in his own.  
  
Charles nodded. “I know. We know. But you can’t—”  
  
“Like hell I can’t,” Erik said.  
  
“—yes, very ferocious of you. I mean you can’t any time soon.” Charles took a deep breath, let it out. Traces of Sebastian Shaw’s cologne hung in the air, overpowering and musky and somehow slimy. Evil, Erik thought, lurking around even after the man himself’d gone. The way an oil-slick would. Cloying and perverse.  
  
“I’m all right,” Charles said again, ignoring the way Logan idly put a fist into the closest wall at the words, not hard but with emphasis. Those blue eyes were shining oddly; feverish, Erik thought, glancing over at Hank. Hank was grinning. Erik was thoroughly confused.  
  
“He’s leaving,” Charles explained. “Not forever, of course. For a week. The unrest along the Wakandan border—” A pause, another breath. “He’ll be back. And Victor Creed _and_ Doctor Essex have been ordered to check on me daily, for my own good, of course. But…”  
  
“But we have a week,” Hank said.  
  
A week. A reprieve. On the one hand, no chance to invite revolutionaries in to storm the palace while Erik put a bullet through the Regent’s heart. On the other, a space for more of those ragged breaths, for Charles to recover, for Charles to rebuild strength and plot the next political chess move or devastating _Times_ editorial.   
  
“I can stay,” Erik said, holding both of Charles’s hands.  
  
Charles smiled, radiant and weary. “Please.”  
  
“Just so you know,” Logan muttered, “this’s a really stupid idea, kid, you know how easy it’ll be for you to get caught?”  
  
“We’ll manage,” Charles said, not looking away from Erik.  
  
“Seventeen and an idiot,” Logan said to the ceiling. “Someone up there help us, ’cause we’re gonna need it.”  
  
Charles beamed at him. “Bring me whatever petitions Sebastian’s been refusing to hear this month, would you? I might not legally be of age—yet—but I can certainly disburse monies from my personal Treasury allowance, and endow a few free clinics. Also grammar schools, I’ve been thinking about that one for a while, the need for an educated and informed populace, and I’ve got a note somewhere from a few of the University masters asking to see me rather than go through official channels…”  
  
“And _rest_ ,” Hank interjected.  
  
“And rest. Possibly with a backrub.” Charles’s expression, trained on Erik, was too exaggeratedly limpid to resist. Erik, who’d never before in his life considered even the concept of himself giving a backrub, found himself scooting onto the bed and resting a tentative hand over Charles’s back.  
  
“Mmm,” Charles said. “I am in fact rather sore. Electric shocks will do that to muscles. Of course, so will everyone’s favorite Regent slapping me under the pretext of waking me up. As revenge I’m planning to approve the suggested currency redesign that has the least flattering version of his face on it. He won’t notice, but I’ll enjoy it, and if production’s already started when he gets back, he can hardly stop it just to spite me.”  
  
“Diabolical,” Erik said, kneading hesitantly at tired muscles, his own vicious capable pistol-trained fingers working knots out of Charles’s back. “I like it.”  
  
“ _Right_ there,” Charles said, practically purring, boneless as a kitten—a kitten with new bruises and angry pink electric burns and unconquerable fierceness—against him. “That feels amazing, thank you…can someone get me tea? And at some future date a change of clothes for Erik? Thank you.” And then, someplace between Hank’s medical eye-rolling and Logan’s bemused expression, fell asleep, curled beside Erik in the royal-linen bed.  
  
Erik looked at him. Looked at Hank. Who said, “He’s fine, I just put something more or less harmless in the chamomile, he’ll wake up in a couple of hours,” and then blushed.  
  
“Well,” Logan rumbled, “time to get started on rounding up petitions and Treasury forms, then, and what size’re you, Fruit Merchant?”  
  
Erik glared. Logan, unperturbed, saluted and ducked away.   
  
Erik sat on the bed with his fingertips lying over Charles’s back, and thought about life and how quickly it could change, and how badly he wanted Shaw dead, and how much he wanted Charles safe and alive. The sunshine tiptoed out anew, faded and tear-streaked but undeniably present; in the other room, Hank was making a fresh pot of tea, and sorting through scientific journals. In a few hours, when Charles woke up, they’d change the world.  
  
He’d always known the world had to be changed. Shaw’s death would accomplish that. Removing an evil.  
  
He’d agreed to work with Emma Frost and the Brotherhood because they wanted what he did, namely the Regent removed. He’d never had a plan for after that. Never envisioned an after.  
  
Charles, the Crown Prince, talked about grammar schools and free clinics and equal rights for Genoshan and other refugees.   
  
Charles kissed him without fear, with nothing held back, with open passion for what they might become together.  
  
Seventeen, and an idiot, Logan’d said. But that wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. Not growing up here in Westchester with Sebastian Shaw as his Regent. Not with those disconcertingly insightful wounded-sapphire eyes.  
  
Charles woke up precisely two hours later, yawning, surprised at having fallen asleep, but willing to accept that this was a thing that might happen. Hank admitted nothing; Erik’s heart broke a little more when Charles sat up and squared shoulders and demanded a pen and the first of the unreviewed citizens’ petitions.  
  
One week. It passed like enchantment, like smoke, like an ephemeral daydream. Evanescence drowned in pale silken rain and the clatter of tea-mugs and the flow of bodies through Charles’s palace apartments. They came dripping storm-water from University gowns or second-hand cloaks or veterans’ uniforms; they spoke to Charles in grave voices, and went away looking thoughtful.  
  
Sebastian Shaw had much of the Court on his side. The lords and ladies and thugs like Creed who owed their positions to his heavyhanded rewarding of usefulness.   
  
Charles had the people. The people he’d written to and for and gone out to mingle with in the streets. He wasn’t one of them, of course, and never quite would be—the Prince’s crown was difficult to remove—but he meant well, meant to do the right thing, and was good at persuasiveness, at charm, at manipulation of bargaining chips among lesser nobility and property-owners. A land-grant in exchange for a promise of support for public education programs. A recognition of a minor lord’s claim to an older title, and hence higher order of precedence, for a promise to sneak more general language regarding women’s access to birth control into a House of Lords act regarding medical care for military veterans.   
  
Charles would be a good king. Would be, Erik thought, and felt the ice along his spine. If. If Emma Frost’s revolutionaries allowed him to be; if they allowed the symbol of the monarchy to live at all.   
  
If Charles made it to his eighteenth birthday. That wasn’t a minor concern. Creed and Essex, the head of Shaw’s personal guard and Shaw’s handpicked physician, did indeed visit daily. In the absence of direct orders, they refrained from electric shocks or bloodletting, but Essex smiled daintily and tested out supposed newfound remedies for weakened hearts, forcing Charles to swallow this or that vile-hued concoction while Creed grinned and kept a heavy hand in his hair. They gave orders about food, restricting his diet; one day nothing made it up from the kitchens at all, no food until Logan snuck bread and cheese out of the guard barracks.  
  
Charles tried to throw up most of the supposed medications, after. He couldn’t always; sometimes they stayed too long, or sometimes it worked too fast, or he was simply too exhausted. One afternoon he ended up delirious, shivering, seeing shapes in the air, talking to Raven—still in the hospital wing—and his mother and purple flowers. Erik and Hank, desperate, tried to get him to sleep, tried to keep him warm, fought to bring the subsequent fever down. Charles woke up several hours later, blinked, and asked, “Why are there blankets on my head?”  
  
The blankets’d been stalwart comrades for holding in body heat after Charles’s skin had gone cold. Erik’d very nearly cried.  
  
They weren’t all frightening days. There were good days, beautiful shining days. Charles sitting up and trouncing Erik soundly at chess because Erik couldn’t stop getting distracted by that smile. Erik reading bits of poetry with Charles nestled between his legs in bed, Donne and Byron and Tennyson. Logan supporting Charles in a recuperative walk across the room, letting go of his shoulder so that Charles stumbled breathless by himself into Erik’s waiting arms.  
  
Charles’s usual bodyguard, in the lack of direct oversight from the Regent, shoved her way back upstairs, limping and angry and ready to throw knives. She flung arms around Charles, who hugged her back, and stayed perched like her namesake around the room for every meeting, ready to fight. Erik respected this readiness. Raven would be a good ally.  
  
Enchanted days. Four, five, six. Changing the world.  
  
One of the less expected visitors, turning up on the fifth day, proved to be Lady Emma Frost. She smiled politely at Charles, expressed every possible clichéd platitude about his health and good wishes, and deliberately did not catch Erik’s eye. She nodded when Charles explained that Mr Eisenhardt had been kind enough to care for him when he’d taken ill in the rain, and then had been rewarded with an interview regarding supplies for the palace kitchens and import rights; all three of them knew, and knew they knew, that this was a lie, but everyone’s daggers remained sheathed. Erik had the impression that both Emma and Charles were reserving judgment. Conspiracies nudging up against each other like cats, not yet willing to share but warily curious.  
  
Emma would want to see him. He knew. She had no good way of contacting him while he remained closeted with Charles; he did not know what he would say, and was, selfishly, glad of the time to strategize.   
  
He had to tell Charles. He’d promised himself and Logan that he would; beyond that, though, he couldn’t see a way around it. Not if he wanted to keep Charles safe amid the oncoming conflagration of the revolution.  
  
Day seven. The Regent had sent word: borders pacified, uneasy truce back in place with Wakanda, he’d be returning to the City the following morning, which probably meant the night before, because Shaw was just that paranoid. Charles looked at Erik; Erik looked back. Charles’s hands remained a bit shaky from the previous day’s near-overdose of unusually strong raw opium, but his voice was utterly calm. “You have to go. Sebastian—if you’re still here, he’ll know. Enough people have seen you. He’ll know anyway, but he’ll assume I wanted to…reward you…some other way. If you’re here he’ll have an excuse to take you away.”  
  
“I can handle myself,” Erik snapped. Charles’s face was too pale. He didn’t like that. “And what do you expect me to do? Go back to the market? Wait for you to find me? Don’t ask me that, Charles, I can’t.”  
  
“At least if you’re outside the palace walls you’ve got a chance.” Charles hesitated. “I’ll get you out.”  
  
Every co-conspirator turned toward the bed and pricked up ears. Not even trying to be subtle.  
  
“No,” Charles said mildly. “If you know, and if Sebastian finds out that you know, well—I can’t allow that to happen. I’ll get Erik out and come back. Is there more marmalade?” And the question should be settled, declared that tone. No arguing with your future king.  
  
Erik, wholeheartedly willing to argue with his future king, said, “That depends on whether you reconsider this plan, Charles,” and held the toast and jam hostage on the other side of the breakfast tray. He was sitting by Charles’s feet; Charles at this point was feeling well enough to attempt a dive across the bed toward him, but not at the expense of the mug of tea cradled in one hand.  
  
Charles sighed, “I’ll concede until after breakfast,” but his eyes were unshakeable. Erik, tempted to argue more, refrained.  
  
Too many reasons. Political: Charles would show him that secret way in and out, that way that might be exploited. Personal: Charles wasn’t well, no, but needed to feel so. Needed, like Erik himself, to act.  
  
He held out the marmalade in unspoken capitulation. Charles took it, and smiled.  
  
After breakfast Charles got up, white-faced and wavering but determined as the next sunrise, and took ginger steps across the room without even reaching out for support. “Someone find me a coat and make certain the hallway’s clear, please…”  
  
“This is a terrible idea,” Hank muttered, but checked regardless. “You’re fine. And by that I mean the coast is clear, not that you are in fact fine, which you’re not.”  
  
“I’m brilliant.” Charles wrapped himself in layers of wool and gloves and firecracker resolution, and took Erik’s hand. “Come on.”  
  
They followed the hallway for several feet—Erik committed steps to memory—and paused in front of an ancestral portrait, some ancient Xaviers wearing starched ruff collars and haughty expressions. Charles grinned. “They do rather instruct one to keep away, don’t they? Here…”  
  
Fingertips brushed a spot on the wall that even to Erik’s sharpened eyes resembled any other; the crack opened and yawned at them. Charles slipped inside the wall without looking back, trusting Erik to follow; Erik mentally cursed his own desire to yank Charles back and take the first step into the dark himself. It was safe. Of course it was safe. Charles knew these walls. And the Palace knew him.  
  
The corridor was narrow, barely enough for two grown men even single-file, even given that one of them was Charles, not only seventeen but pixie-sized. The air tasted of dryness and antique dim dust and cracks of light; the stone underfoot made no noise, worn smooth and soft by time. Charles walked like a cat in the darkness, the unerring confidence of someone who’d made this trek multiple times; Erik, eyes not compensating fast enough, kept up and didn’t talk. Wasn’t sure how thick the cushion was on either side.  
  
Charles paused; Erik nearly ran into his back. “Stairs. Somewhat vertically difficult ones; you may need to duck.”  
  
“So we _can_ talk…”  
  
Charles half-turned, glancing at him, eyes strangely unreadable. “Not loudly, but yes. We can. These’ve been here for, oh, centuries, by the way; there’re quite a few wrong turnings and ways to get lost, so I’d not try this without me, or someone else who knows the passages, which I suppose at the moment would be only me, so never mind…oh, drat, sorry, that step’s uneven, I should’ve warned you. All right?”  
  
Erik glared at the step in the darkness. “Fine.”  
  
“Good.” Charles led him around a corner, another corner—Erik kept track of rights and lefts automatically, but he was beginning to suspect that Charles was correct about the difficulties of leading anyone else through the byzantine twists; had that been a loop for no reason, or _for_ a reason?—and stopped. This particular space was slightly larger and brighter, a long slim streak of white gold along the back; they could stand shoulder to shoulder, and did, while the graveyard-ghost light hovered uneasily among the unsaid words. A recognizable cloak hung on one wall: the old-fashioned billowy concealment Charles wore to visit him.  
  
Charles scuffed a foot idly in nonexistent dirt, terribly casual. “About talking. We can, here; we’re far enough under the keep that no one’ll hear. Outside the Treasury, in fact. If that’s important to you.”  
  
“Why would it—”  
  
“You are working with the Brotherhood, aren’t you? Do you need money?”  
  
And Erik, for perhaps the only time in his life, had nothing: no answer, no recourse, no anger, no stiletto-knife in his hand, no cold calculated reply.  
  
Not even white noise. Only a hush. The world spinning on a precipice, airless.  
  
Charles added, exquisitely dry, “I may be underage and an invalid, but I did grow up around secrets. No one’d heard anything about you before you turned up in the market that first day, not even your supposed merchant trading contacts. Are you working with Emma Frost?”  
  
“How—how did you—”  
  
“So you are. I wasn’t sure about her until just now, but the two of you were so scrupulously unsurprised to see each other that I thought it was a fair guess. Seems I was right; what’re you two planning to do with me, then?”  
  
“—we’re not,” Erik whispered. Awkwardly, around the large difficult obstacle in his lungs. The weight of his pistol nestled pointedly at his back. “Nothing. We just want—we want him dead. Shaw. Charles, I—”  
  
“I’d hate to think these were only a means of getting close to me.” Charles held up both hands. Those sapphire-wool gloves. Damning accusation in the tight-knit weave.  
  
“It was about him,” Erik said, desperate and not quite sure why, not knowing the origin of the sudden panic but very aware of its hooks in his chest and gut and bones, “but no, those weren’t, those were—I meant them. I meant to tell you.”  
  
“You didn’t need to.” Charles curled fingers in and out, watching the bend and flex of fabric. Then crossed his arms, leaning not-quite-negligently against the closest anxious wall. “I mean both. That, and these. You’re still the man who sat with me when even Hank thought I was going to die. You gave me water.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik said, standing very still in the eerie rock-light castle passageway, carved stone inexplicably wobbly under his feet.  
  
And Charles for the first time looked surprised.   
  
“I mean that,” Erik said, “too. Everything. You’re right about me.”  
  
“Of course I am.” But Charles was smiling now, the barest hint of invitation, limned by secret-passage dust. “I needed to know what you’d say. And you might as well take me to Emma or do whatever you were planning to do with me. Though you may wish to let me show you the rest of the way out. There’s one more tunnel and a rope that you’ll have to throw over the wall at the end. I’ll be your bargaining chip; I assume that’s what you need.”  
  
Erik, utterly lost—the solid stone hadn’t gotten any less shaky, unless that was his legs and heart—managed, “Why?”  
  
A shrug, a glance down, a glance up, another smile, fraying and radiant as fractured rainbows. Battle-flag hope marching around the silent room, the space between walls. “Sebastian’ll be back tonight and I expect that’ll be painful. Or you want something from me and I owe you. Or you want something from me and I can give it. Or I love you.”  
  
“You,” Erik whispered, and Charles said, “Of course I do, Erik, I love you,” and tried to push himself up from the wall but stumbled a little, and Erik’s arms went around him and Erik’s mouth found his, desperate and sweet in the not-quite-dark.  
  
Charles’s hands landed on his shoulders, not pushing away but pulling closer; Erik teased bright lips into parting more, applying pressure and the barest nip of teeth. Charles gasped and snuck his tongue into Erik’s mouth, playful and not at all embarrassed to explore. He tasted like marmalade, Erik thought, like the toast they’d shared that morning in bed. Like summery orange sugar and the bergamot murmur of rich sweetened tea.   
  
“I love you,” he told Charles’s lips, informed the shell-curve of an ear, announced into the soft spot beneath the line of Charles’s jaw. Charles sighed Erik’s name and tilted his head for better access; Erik learned the taste of pale skin all over again, and learned how those fantastical words sounded in a proper Westchestrian accent—I love you, breathed by Charles against his mouth, his cheek, warm and secure.  
  
Charles was wearing a fine linen shirt, carelessly expensive; he breathed out, audible but unafraid, when Erik’s hand wandered up and untucked one side and flattened over beckoning skin. Erik, gazing into blue eyes, understood how much Charles wanted this; could feel Charles hard and hot against his hip, leaning into the touch; could see the fire in blue eyes.  
  
He knew Charles hadn’t had much experience. Some, yes. And a lot of reading.  
  
He slid his hand lower, flirting with the waist of Charles’s trousers. Charles grabbed his hand and tugged. Erik raised eyebrows, observed, “No underthings, then…” and wrapped his fingers around Charles’s cock, firm and full and flushed with desire, ready as only a teenager and a very impatient virgin could be. Charles groaned softly; Erik stroked him, unhurried and drawn-out, enjoying the way Charles trembled and tried to arch into his hand.  
  
“Here,” he started, meaning to ask; Charles announced definitively, “Here,” and fumbled his own trousers open, flinching as cool air met heated skin, blushing but not backing down.  
  
“You’ll end up messy,” Erik murmured, tracing fingers along his length, loving the sensation. Iron and velvet, blood and life and want. “So wet already, Charles…for me…when I touch you, like this…”  
  
“ _Please_ —”  
  
“I can’t—we can’t—I don’t have anything to—”  
  
“To—oh.” Charles’s cheeks were pink, but he gazed at Erik’s hand fondling him with rapt fascination. “You mean you can’t fuck me. Don’t look shocked. I know the word. Reading, remember.”  
  
“Hmm,” Erik said, “well, then, did your reading prepare you for this,” and dropped to both knees and took Charles into his mouth.  
  
Charles made a sudden astonished sound, stuttered inhale like a gut-punch, and twined hands into Erik’s hair, holding on. Erik grinned, mostly inwardly, and got on with the initiation, licking, tasting, sucking, adoring the weight of Charles, heavy and thick, on his tongue and filling his mouth and throat.  
  
He’d done this before, on occasion; scattered seductions, mostly, working his way over to Westchester and into the City. Always businesslike, those occasions. A transaction, a calculation.  
  
This wasn’t businesslike. Nothing mercenary about the way Charles moaned and shuddered, eyes and hips and wet-tipped cock an open book, a now-known language, nothing held back. Erik could’ve stayed on his knees on the old stone floor forever and been happy.  
  
He flicked his tongue over the slit, under the head, sucking; Charles let out a tiny scream and went rigid and then was coming, spilling into his mouth, orgasm over-eager and all-encompassing. Erik swallowed, swallowed again, and then bolted to feet in just enough time to catch his Prince before his Prince’s legs gave out.  
  
“Are you all right? Breathe!”  
  
“Fine…fine, sorry, I just…”  
  
“That’s not you breathing! Head up, dammit, look at me!” He steadied Charles’s neck. Opening airways. They’d collapsed into a panicked pile of half-dressed limbs on the ground. “Charles?”  
  
“I really am fine, it’s just that I feel dizzy…”  
  
“I don’t like the way your heart sounds.”  
  
“No one ever likes the way my heart sounds.” Head propped against Erik’s shoulder, spent cock lying outside his trousers, Charles dredged up a smile. “My heart quite likes your heart, however. And your mouth.”  
  
“Should I be worried about you growing delirious? Don’t sit up yet.” He kept a proprietary hand on that treacherous chest. “Does this happen when you…I mean, if you…should we be never having sex again?” His entire body was quivering with reaction. Incandescent pleasure, himself on his knees being inundated with the taste and scent and presence of Charles. Bone-deep earthshattering fear.  
  
“Well, this’s never happened before…of course, I’m not normally enjoying myself with anyone else…no, I think it’s only the circumstances.” Charles put his hand atop Erik’s. Sapphire-knit wool over skin. A vow. “I’ve been recovering, and then not eating much, and then bringing you down here. I think it’ll be better if we try a second time. I’d like to try a second time. I say try; I think that was a fairly spectacular success.”  
  
Ninety percent of Erik’s heart wanted to snap that they were never trying a second time. Looking into sea-spray eyes, he said, “Only if you eat three square meals and then convince me that you can walk across a room unaided,” and Charles, understanding, laughed.  
  
“Er…” One hip wriggled against Erik’s thigh, in apology. “What about you?”  
  
“What about me being terrified that you’re about to die in my arms? No.”  
  
Charles’s mouth quirked up. “I wasn’t about to die. I had an orgasm. A very lovely one. Thank you.”  
  
“Lovely?”  
  
“Well—what would you call it? Marvelous? Tremendous?”  
  
“I do like tremendous,” Erik said, and put his face into Charles’s hair and breathed for a while.  
  
Eventually he added, speaking into dark rumpled waves, “Also no.”  
  
“Mmm?” Charles had been asleep, or close to it. An old rusty spot in Erik’s heart twinged, tender and fond. “No? No about what?”  
  
“About you coming with me.” He stroked a wayward strand back into place at Charles’s temple. “My bargaining chip. No.”  
  
“Oh….why not, again? It’s not a bad idea. Certainly not for you.”  
  
For Charles it was. For Charles, who could barely breathe on his own. No pillow-strewn beds or Hank McCoy in Erik’s miniscule drafty rented loft-rooms. “You’re more useful here. A spy, if you’d like. Feeding us information. I’ll keep meeting you.”  
  
“Also dangerous,” Charles said, thoughtfully but with a glint in his eyes that suggested he knew each and every one of Erik’s reasons. “Sebastian doesn’t trust me. And Essex—well. But I suppose it is time to trust someone. We can’t overthrow Sebastian without help, even the Brotherhood’s help, and I can be of some assistance to you, I think. In exchange for a guarantee of personal security, and security for my people, naturally.”  
  
Politics and revolutions. Absurd, Erik thought, sitting on the floor with the tang of sex and sweat in the air, on his tongue; with Charles having nearly died all over again a moment before. And they’d play the game out because they had to.   
  
They both knew he couldn’t make those guarantees. No authority to do so. He said, “I’ll make sure that happens.”  
  
“There’ll be a reception,” Charles said. “Tomorrow. Honoring Sebastian’s return. I’ll let you know what I hear. I’m certain Lady Frost will be there, but I’m closer to Sebastian, not in the same way that you and I are close, you understand. And I love you. I feel like saying that. And like kissing you.”  
  
Erik kissed him, while Charles’s pulse swooped and fluttered like drunken hummingbirds beneath his fingers. Promised, “I love you, Charles,” as they stumbled to their feet, getting dressed without ever relinquishing entwined fingertips.   
  
Charles opened the door and led him down through the Treasury, through piles of gold and gemstones and jewelry, fabulous shapes and sizes and colors and hues. Shimmering topaz and tanzanite; centuries-old peridot and emerald and ambassador’s-gift jade. Ivory and ruby blossoms in odd corners. A sparkling diamond tiara worth more than Erik could ever, had ever, imagined. Enough wealth to feed a nation; stockpiles not being spent, because the Regent didn’t give a damn about anyone’s comfort unless it affected his own.  
  
Erik picked his way through neat strongboxes in tidy piles and held Charles’s hand. Charles, who was worth more than everything in the room.  
  
Charles waved at a large gold-and-mahogany striped chest; Erik obligingly shoved it out of the way, discovering a slim trap-door. Blue eyes got a little wistful, loneliness reflected in forlorn treasure-heaps around them. “It’s fairly straightforward from here. Just follow the tunnel. It’ll come up where I go over the wall—you did see that, or so you’ve said—”  
  
They both winced. Charles still didn’t remember that one.  
  
Covering up the inadvertent bruise, Charles hastily went on, “—anyway you know where it comes out. There’s a rope you can throw over; it’ll catch on the roof, it’s weighted. Drop it back when you’re done. I’d come, but that part of the tunnel does get a bit uneven…dirt, when you go under the moat, and sometimes water…”  
  
“I can figure it out,” Erik said, and kissed his fingers, the warm skin at the very edge of blue gloves, his gloves, the ones he’d given to Charles. “You stay here.”  
  
Charles stepped closer, winding their bodies together, himself in the circle of Erik’s arms. “I’ll come find you. Not tomorrow—Sebastian’ll want me, and then there’s the reception—but the morning after.”  
  
“Afternoon,” Erik decided. “Stay in bed, in the morning.” Please.  
  
“You can imagine me in bed,” Charles said, and smiled, leaning in. Their foreheads touched; Erik took a breath, let it out. Traced the line of Charles’s spine with fingers, memorizing every inch, every knob of bone.  
  
On the strength of that knowledge, that breath, he made himself step away. And he slipped into the tunnel and felt his feet sink fractionally into damp sunless dirt, shadows tugging at his heels.  
  
Charles waved, and mouthed _, love you_ , soundless and true as embers, banked but never put out, not in any way cold.  
  
Erik lifted a hand and said, “I love you, now go get back in your damn bed, Charles,” and the trap-door swung shut on the song of cheerful princely laughter, and Erik smiled. His lips and skin and body hummed with Charles, in the face of every too-real danger they’d just been discussing, like defiance, like the unfamiliar unaccustomed deliciously infuriating sweet ache behind his breastbone, in his heart. 


	9. champagne, lemonade, black coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I did say reward,” Sebastian announced. “And as Regent I have been tirelessly working to secure a suitable match for our poor dear Prince, a partner who can give him the strength he needs…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Argh argh argh apologies for the delay! I promise I have an Outline and this fic will get Finished. I swear.
> 
> Also this chapter is for [avictoriangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/avictoriangirl/pseuds/avictoriangirl), who waited very patiently for it as a belated birthday-present. <3
> 
> Warnings for Creed forcing unwanted kisses on Charles in a ballroom, here.

The night glittered. Lords and ladies of the Court in expensive silks and satins, furs and lace. Wide skirts were coming back into fashion; hoops bustled and swung, and shimmers of jewelry caught the light and flung it back magnified a thousandfold in citrine and carnelian and jade, until the world dazzled every sense.  
  
Charles, dressed in his best formal suit—not ceremonial monarchical robes, not for a party, but elegant and confining nevertheless—put on a smile for the crowds. Sebastian’d come to his rooms earlier, sleek and self-satisfied: Wakanda’d been suitably pacified, and Charles hated to think of Sebastian’s definition of _suitable_.  
  
Sebastian’d chucked him under the chin, beamed avuncularly, and told him not to exert himself. Told him that there’d be a surprise at the reception. That he should be looking forward to an announcement.  
  
Charles, playing the curious invalid role—not a lie, not most of it—the way he had for years, had pasted on a wide-eyed wary expression. Sebastian knew that Charles disliked him, and Charles knew he knew; any gushing innocence wouldn’t’ve been believed, but cautious interest would be. Sebastian didn’t think the heir to the throne was capable of getting out of bed without assistance, and even less so regarding the sticking of determined spokes into political wheels. Sebastian’s ego was easy enough to flatter when the man saw himself as Charles’s benefactor, doling out scraps of information.  
  
This time Charles was nervous. Sebastian’d laughed and patted him on the head and said, again, “Don’t spoil the surprise, my boy. Though given your recent proclivities you’ll likely be thrilled,” and then swept out of the room amid an aura of amused menace.  
  
Recent proclivities, Charles heard once more, an echo as he curled legs under himself in the chair. His body ached; Essex had been by with salts of mercury and red pepper and poppy-juice, and the world tilted briefly in a drunken haze before righting itself. He’d not managed to eat anything since the morning’s weak tea, and the ominous looming towers of lobster and champagne on gaudy reception-tables were doing nothing for his appetite. Hank McCoy and Raven—limping but angry about it—had taken up residence beside his chair for an hour or so, until Sebastian’d come by and silkily suggested that Charles was safe enough, certainly, with all of the Regent’s handpicked guards about, and Doctor Essex was present already, one physician could look after one fragile prince, though someone would call Hank if need be, of course, no matter where he might’ve gone…  
  
Charles had caught Hank’s eye. Hank had choked down a protest that’d likely have ended in prison or worse, and gone.  
  
Charles propped his head on one head. Being purportedly ill did have a few advantages; nobody was forcing him to dance, he could watch the eddies and flows of conspiratorial bodies in conversation around the room, and he could put his feet up and find a comfortable position in the ludicrously oversized elaborate royal lounge. With pillows.   
  
The headaches had lessened: not completely gone, but mostly only present when he forgot and touched small angry electric-burn scars. The memories had more or less returned, albeit in a confused tangle of real and unreal, dreamscapes and startlingly clear sketches. A thunderclap of rain. Erik’s smile. Charles’s father’s voice, patently impossible given how many years Brian Xavier’d been deceased. Hank’s voice. The tastes of tea and water and tears. Swirls of muddied color, blurring into each other.  
  
He’d nearly died. He knew how close he’d come.   
  
The people he loved had saved him. He knew that, too.  
  
Victor Creed wandered over, a wall of brown-striped velvet and pure evil. As the head of Sebastian’s personal guard—and, given that Sebastian rewarded useful minions handsomely, also the Count of some unfortunate minor territories and City landholdings—he wasn’t on duty but was permitted both sword and pistol, and he smiled with crooked teeth, feral and wide, and he held a cup of lemonade. “Drink.”  
  
Charles raised eyebrows, annoyed and pulling rank because of it. Creed glared. “Drink. Highness.”  
  
“Thank you.” He took the cup. Did not drink. Victor Creed bringing him anything meant that Sebastian’d sent it, which might only be a whim— _see how easily I can interrupt your life, boy?—_ but might of course be altogether more sinister.  
  
Creed loomed over him, grinning in an altogether unpleasant fashion. “You get a surprise tonight, Highness. Just wait.”  
  
“As if you know what that might be.” Charles looked into his cup, then set it aside, with a gesture learned from his mother: _that’s THAT politeness out of the way, then_. Creed scowled and rumbled, “I do. And you don’t. Pretty little prince that you are. It’ll be fun.”  
  
“I refuse to believe that you know what fun means, either.” Charles sat up more, straightening his spine. The room spun once, crazily, dancers haloed by light. “Are you planning to make me guess? Or is it simply that you’re unsure Sebastian’s told you the truth?”  
  
“He has.” Creed smirked. Charles never wanted to see Creed smirk again. “And I’ll enjoy it.”  
  
“How thrilling for you,” Charles said, and tried again not to be scared, or at least to push the scared deep down into a red-hot ball of lead in his stomach where it could transmute into fury; and then Sebastian stepped over to the lounge-chair and smiled and tapped a knife against his crystal champagne-flute. The resulting music sang sharp and brittle and vicious as broken glass. The room fell silent.  
  
“On this occasion,” Sebastian said, “on this momentous occasion, peace along our borders, peace here at home…”  
  
Peace because they hate you, Charles thought. Peace because you have half their sons hostage, in the guise of fostering-out to men under your thumb. But you don’t know me. You don’t know Erik.  
  
He tuned back in. Sebastian, in typical grandiloquent fashion, was purring about the great prowess of his Guardsmen, due to Victor Creed’s leadership, and Creed deserved a grand reward. The actual person of Creed leered down at Charles. Charles coughed, on purpose, to interrupt Sebastian’s next line.  
  
The Regent’s eyes turned colder for a split second, loathing and calculation visible; but Shaw brushed the irritation away, grin spreading. “Stand up, dear boy. You’ll be a part of this as well; let everyone see you.”  
  
Charles debated faking weakness, but he did want to be on his feet for whatever Sebastian had planned. He got up. Hand on the arm of the chair. Suit chilly around his body. The room twinkled like a drug-heightened starry sky.  
  
“I did say reward,” Sebastian announced. “And as Regent I have been tirelessly working to secure a suitable match for our poor dear Prince, a partner who can give him the strength he needs…”  
  
You _have?_ Charles thought. Since _when?_  
  
“…alas, no suitable foreign alliances could be found.” Sebastian clasped his hands together, a showman reveling in the performance. “But luckily I recalled an old statute, one that permits, in such cases, the option to look inward, to strengthen our internal bonds, to bring the prowess of a great warrior or champion into the royal line…”  
  
Wait, Charles said, and he knew his lips moved, but no sound—  
  
“And so I am taking this occasion to announce the betrothal of our beloved Prince Charles to the man I consider my champion,” Sebastian concluded, “Count Victor Creed!”  
  
Charles thought at first he’d misheard. Couldn’t be right. Sebastian couldn’t’ve said—  
  
He couldn’t breathe. Creed’s smile was filling up the world.  
  
He felt his heart pounding, felt himself waver on his feet, and not now, please, not now, but he couldn’t think, as if every last drop of laudanum or calomel or foxglove he’d ever been given had descended all over again. Victor Creed. Himself. A betrothal.   
  
Creed’s meaty hand bit down on his upper arm. Bruising force. Saying something, a joke, about how overcome with joy the Prince evidently was, fainting into his arms. Chuckles from Sebastian’s cronies, and from a crowd wary of the Regent’s wrath.  
  
No, Charles thought. No. And he clung to that denial through the fog of dizziness and pain as Creed’s hand crushed muscle against bone. Sebastian could arrange a marriage, of course; the Regent had that legal right. But nothing could happen, no ceremony, until Charles came of age. And the ceremony required the question, the consent, the verbal _I do_. Which he’d never give. He had that choice.  
  
Never, of course, meant only until Sebastian held a gun to Raven’s head somewhere in the audience. Charles understood that much.   
  
He’d not survive this marriage. Sebastian wouldn’t have Creed kill him on the wedding night, of course; probably not even on the honeymoon, still too suspicious. But shortly thereafter. A sickly groom. Too delicate. Too weak for marital duties. A chill.   
  
The pain in his arm made it real. Probably a metaphor, that; but his thoughts kept on scattering like shocked bluebirds.  
  
A hand caught his other arm. A woman’s hand; Charles turned his head, saw Raven’s eyes behind a black crêpe widow’s veil. Her dress was too large and also black; some Court lady somewhere would be missing a gown. He wanted to tell her to go, to hide—the disguise wouldn’t hold up to any scrutiny—but at the moment he was only desperately glad of the touch.  
  
The crowd was applauding like Sebastian’d held hot pokers to their arms. Uneasy. Forced. The traditionalists among them shifted and muttered and did nothing overt.  
  
Charles, grounded by Raven on one side and the ebbing of the first wave of shock, had to admire the plan. Creed wasn’t stupid, despite thinking mainly with those muscles; he knew he owed his position to Sebastian. And Sebastian, for his part, could continue as the power behind the throne, especially with Charles unwell and slowly languishing away. The Court would begrudgingly accept Victor Creed as ruler once Charles died: better someone they knew, someone with a façade of respectability as the Royal Consort, than an outright coup. And Sebastian would win.  
  
The same-sex marriage law was a very old one, centuries of weight behind the concept. It’d been created as a political maneuver: obviously a monarch had to have children, continuing the royal line, but if an advantageous marriage might be made between two princes, that would also serve. A suitable princess would be found as a royal surrogate, and treated much as a secondary spouse; Charles’d always found this vaguely unfair to the princess in question, but then he’d also assumed the whole idea would be more or less hypothetical in his case, given the odds about his survival to inherit.  
  
And Sebastian had taken that hypothesis and made it concrete. Charles could measure his own lifespan, now: the months until his birthday and his wedding day, perhaps a month-long honeymoon, a long wasting decline to give the people time to become used to the idea…  
  
He said, looking up at his fiancé, “I’m sorry, Victor, I’m feeling…excuse me, I’d like to lie down.”  
  
Victor Creed laughed. Put out a paw of a hand, lifted Charles’s chin. “Too much excitement, pretty boy? It’s all right, you’ll be safe with me, once we’re wed.” The avid glitter in beady eyes proclaimed the opposite.  
  
Sebastian Shaw regarded Charles’s sudden pronouncement with mild skepticism, but only mild. Charles held his breath and tried to look unwell. At the moment this wasn’t much of a stretch.  
  
“My poor boy,” Shaw said, and patted his arm. A benevolent dictator, pleased to grant a child’s whim. “Of course. We wouldn’t want you overexerting yourself, and I understand you’ve been so under the weather lately. Perhaps Doctor Essex should accompany you upstairs.”  
  
Charles swallowed, and said, “I appreciate the concern, Sebastian, but—” A flicker of glance at the punch table, where Essex was currently on his eighth glass of champagne. “—I believe I can manage.”  
  
Sebastian glanced at his tipsy minion, too. Annoyance flitted across his mouth, then faded: a minor hiccup. “Then we shall see you in the morning, Charles. Breakfast. We can discuss your upcoming nuptials then.”  
  
Charles nodded, afraid if he said anything more he’d end up throwing his abandoned lemonade cup in his Regent’s face, and moved to go. Creed’s hand snagged his arm; Creed’s voice snickered, “What, no kiss?” and before he could protest hot thick lips came crashing down over his.  
  
Creed’s breath smelled of cheap liquor and cigars, and Creed’s tongue shoved thick and insistent into Charles’s mouth, and Creed’s hands were heavy and cruel; Charles stumbled, off-balance and terrified and more sickened than he’d’ve thought possible at the taste of the man. Creed caught him, pulled him closer, and Charles realized that the man was excited, was turned on by this public violation, by Charles’s supposed helplessness. He wanted to vomit. He couldn’t breathe past the weight of that mouth on his.  
  
No one was going to save him, not here with the Regent at his side and plainly approving. Creed could fuck him in the ballroom, on the champagne-strewn banquet tables, and none of the Court would step in. They knew who owned the City’s guardsmen, armies, treasury.  
  
Creed and Sebastian didn’t own _him_. They never would.   
  
Charles, perfectly aware that this was a ridiculous melodramatic seventeen-year-old’s thought about fate and free will and his overestimation of his own ability, thought it anyway. Jerked back, shaking, shaken. Creed’s teeth caught on his lip and grazed it, so that he tasted blood.  
  
Creed laughed.   
  
Charles hated the world, and Sebastian Shaw, and the Court, and the City he was trying to save, in that moment. He even hated Erik, only for a second, Erik who wasn’t magically there to rescue him all over again. He hated the taste and feel of lips on his.  
  
He pushed all that aside. Said coolly, “I’m gratified to see I’m not the only inexperienced one; perhaps you can practice before our wedding night?” and had the petty satisfaction of watching Victor Creed turn dull red from humiliated anger.  
  
He turned—Raven’s hand hovered near his elbow, though leaning on her would be too obvious—and left the ballroom. Holding himself together, as the crowd parted like astonished gossiping seas.  
  
Out near the Grand Staircase—below it, more accurately; he’d used one of the lower ballroom doors—he found Hank pacing anxiously. Hank took him by the shoulders, scrutinized his face, touched his cheek. “That bite—I was watching from the keyhole. Did he hurt you?”  
  
“It’s not bad,” Charles sighed, though it was. Not in the way Hank meant; his lip would heal quickly. The nausea at being touched, being casually forced—would take longer. “Can you find Lady Frost for me, please?”  
  
“I can find you a damned rabies shot. The man’s an animal. Sit down before you fall down.”  
  
“I can go,” Raven said, “if you need her, but, Charles, you’re as white as a sheet—”  
  
“I don’t care.” His head ached fiercely; he shut both eyes and pressed the heels of his hands over them, hiding inside pain-sprinkled darkness. He wanted to scrub the evening away; he wanted to change time and space and the City’s future. He wanted Erik, and someone to hold on to.   
  
He opened his eyes. “I also need some assistance with the stairs.”  
  
“Obviously,” Hank said, exquisitely dry.  
  
“I mean back to our rooms.” He didn’t. Or only insofar as the passageways opened up near there.  
  
“I know what you mean,” Hank said, “and you’re a moron. A royal one, who pays my salary, but still.”  
  
“And why is that?” inquired a cool aristocratic voice, and Emma Frost appeared, stepping gracefully out of the ballroom door, regarding their huddle in the shadow of the staircase with chilly white-satin disdain. “I understand you wanted to see me, Highness.”  
  
Since Raven had not in fact made it back to the ballroom with this news, Charles could only guess at Emma Frost’s sources, and be impressed. He said, “Charles, please, I think we can all agree that we’re in this together,” and got a skeptical eyebrow tilt that spoke volumes about Lady Frost’s willingness to be on a first-name basis with an untitled physician and a bodyguard. Ah, well. “And I do. I know you know Erik Lehnsherr, Lady Frost. Can you tell him I need to see him? Or—tell me where to find him? It’s urgent.”  
  
Emma Frost’s eyes narrowed. “Erik Lehnsherr. Your merchant.”  
  
“We’re not playing games.” Too tired, too little time, too much heartsoreness and hurt. “I’ll owe you a favor. Call it in for what you like, whatever it’s worth. You were in that ballroom. I won’t interfere with your plans. I just—I’d like to see Erik—please.” He let the hurt show. It was real, if deliberately employed; Emma Frost’s expression softened minutely. Compassion, perhaps. As if she’d loved someone, or lost someone, or both, once upon a time.  
  
She said, “I can send him a message. Tell him to come to my townhouse—my other townhouse—for a meeting. It’ll take some time. Can you be there?”  
  
“I can be there.”  
  
“Charles—” Hank started, and fell silent as Charles turned that way.  
  
“Tell me the address.”  
  
She did. Once. She expected him to memorize it; he did. The evening felt dreamlike, not the good kind of dream, but the swirling dangerous misty places where shadows lived, where any step might land on unreal ground.   
  
Hank said, unhappily but loyally, “We’ll barricade the door and tell everyone you’re exhausted, then, shall we?”  
  
“Please.” He put a hand on Hank’s shoulder. “Thank you.”  
  
“Don’t,” Hank said, and his eyes said _I don’t know how to cure this, how to help you, I’m your physician, I’m so sorry_. “Just go. If you need him, if you need—just go.”  
  
“Send your message,” Charles said to Emma Frost, and she nodded once and whirled away in icy silk and diamonds, every motion both flamboyant and economical somehow, unruffled but dramatic. He supposed that this meant she trusted him, or trusted him enough; he felt ruffled inside and out, for his part, as if his tailored blue Court suit ought to’ve gone black with the memory of Victor Creed’s mouth. Nothing like Lady Frost’s elegant coolness. Only himself, tired and heart-sick and determined and afraid.  
  
Hank and Raven got him up the sweep of the Grand Staircase and through winding corridors and into his suite of rooms, where books fretted over him in leatherbound piles. Microscope lenses peeked up anxiously; Raven went over to start a fire, generating heat. Charles stripped off his Court suit and threw it in a heap, and only realized how badly his hands were trembling as he reached for street-appropriate trousers. Half-dressed, he lunged for tooth-powder and his brush. Hank steadied him with a hand on his back, and said nothing, for which Charles was unutterably grateful, not only because he couldn’t speak with a tooth-brush in his mouth.  
  
He spit, gulped down water, dragged a hand over his face. “I’m all right.” He mostly was. Mostly.  
  
Hank nodded again. Raven came over and held out her favorite knife, slender and strong and wordless. Charles slid it into a pocket, and hugged her.  
  
The night burned cold as moon-fire along his face, his throat, as he slid over the wall and down into the City. He kept his hood up, a disguise; but found himself reaching out: fingers brushing a crumbling brick wall, an apple tree, the corner of a street-vendor’s cart. Anchors, in the swell of early morning, midnight giving way to a new day. Sebastian’s guests would be dancing, drinking, reckless and senseless and heedless of the cracked pavements and bundled bodies sleeping in doorways beyond the palace walls. Charles repeated the address Emma’d given him, in his head, and wove his way gingerly through gin-shops and gaslit fog.  
  
Emma Frost’s second townhouse stood in an unremarkable location, and was indeed unremarkable itself; might’ve belonged to a down-at-the-heels impoverished courtier, or a mistress who rarely came into the City, preferring country estates. The general air was one of genteel neglect, with narrow closed windows like suspicious eyes. Charles crossed the square, and the tattered pile of nautical clothes sitting on the steps stirred, and Erik bolted to his feet, eyes giving too many emotions away.  
  
“A sailor’s uniform,” Charles said, “really, drunk and disorderly,” and struggled to not simply fall into Erik’s arms and cry.  
  
“I couldn’t just look like me—” Erik said, shaking his head, “Charles, what happened, what _happened_ , Emma said you needed to see me and she told you about this place—” And his hands closed on Charles’s shoulders with frightened strength.  
  
Charles flinched. Inadvertent. The gas-lamp sputtered and went out, overhead.  
  
Erik dropped the hands as if the touch burned, or as if he’d burned Charles, force leaving scorch-marks through cloak-fabric. “I didn’t—Emma said—Charles, I didn’t think. I can kill him for you. Let me kill him for you.”  
  
“Not tonight,” Charles said, “not tonight, we have to think, we have to plan, we have to—” and then he was kissing Erik or Erik was kissing him, fierce enough to scour all the other memories away, leaving only his lips and Erik’s on the front steps of a dilapidated townhouse under the big round moon.  
  
Erik tasted like black coffee and anger and home. Charles fell in love with black coffee and the way Erik’s arms took him in, gentle and almost disbelieving, a hesitance at odds with the simmering ire and desire Charles could feel in every tense line. They must look like an illicit rendezvous, he thought giddily: an ordinary sailor and his boy, caught in the act of making love via kisses on a doorstep. And he wanted that. Yes.  
  
“We should,” Erik breathed against his mouth, and Charles finished, “go inside,” and they went up the last two steps and pushed the door open together; Emma’d not left it unlocked, but both Erik and Charles knew how to pick those. Erik kissed him for that, deep and hungry. Charles touched Erik’s cheek, shivering a little: not from fear, but from the clearheaded knowledge of true want.  
  
“Plans,” Erik murmured, lips trailing along his jawline, his throat; “and you’ll let me hurt them for hurting you,” to which Charles answered, “you think I wouldn’t do it myself, honestly, Erik,” and dragged that delicious mouth back to his.  
  
“Charles,” Erik said, once, when they stumbled in the entry hall, when Erik’s hands balanced him, “are you—”  
  
“Well enough,” Charles said, “please don’t,” and took Erik’s hand. “Are there bedrooms upstairs? I’ve never been here…”  
  
“There should be.” Erik looked a bit dazed from the kissing. “I’ve never been upstairs.”  
  
“Let’s find out,” Charles said, “together.”


	10. toasted cheese and bacon sandwiches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik and Charles make love, plots unfold, opera happens, and a City goes up in flame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter in which Erik and Charles finally have the sex! Thank you to everyone who's been reading along and putting up with my slowness on this, seriously. I love you. (Er. Apologies about the cliffhanger...)
> 
> **Warnings for:** dubcon verging on non-con, suggestions of abuse. Specifically, Victor Creed forcing caresses—petting, kisses, sitting on laps, etc—on Charles, who technically _could_ say no and make a public scene--he has the ability to and he knows he could--but he isn’t really in a position to, given both drugs and politics of the situation; also allusions to Creed having been guilty of similar but even worse abuse in the past, involving another boy.

Erik couldn’t quite believe his senses; couldn’t trust them, as the night unspooled into dreams. Charles was here and had come to him and wanted him. Charles was in his arms.   
  
And that was real: it was real because it hurt, because Charles had been hurt, and had flinched from his touch before turning to him; and Erik would not have believed the love without the pain to cement it as true.   
  
And it was real. It was all real.   
  
He nevertheless wished that the night could change. That Charles hadn’t instinctively twitched away from a man’s hands gripping his shoulders.    
  
“Charles,” he breathed, halfway up the slim inner stair. Charles, a step above him, bent down and kissed him: fingers sliding up to cup Erik’s cheek like rain.   
  
Emma Frost’s townhouse existed in silent gloomy splendor around them: sheet-draped furniture in the parlor, portraits of long-dead ancestors—likely not Emma’s own; she’d never give so many secrets away—glowering over ghostly walls. Conspiracies lurked in the sitting room, in the kitchen, in the meeting-place of the Brotherhood. The candelabra glimmered in Erik’s left hand: illuminating hushed footfalls and the living quick heat of breath, and Charles meeting him here.   
  
Charles laced their fingers together and pulled him up the stairs. Opened a door at random: a mop closet. “Probably not.”   
  
“Do Emma’s servants even come here?”   
  
“No one comes here.” Charles pushed at another door. It swung wide, obligingly: a bedroom and a bed, white stiff counterpane and closed shutters and dust. “I knew about Lady Frost’s Court townhome. The one that hosts balls and soirees. This one…”   
  
This one’s where we meet, Erik did not say, to overthrow the government and the monarchy and your future. “She has secrets.”   
  
“She does, and you do, and I do, and everyone does.” Charles stopped walking, pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes for a moment. “I know.”   
  
“I love you,” Erik said. “That’s not a secret.” And somehow this was inexplicably the right thing to say, because Charles dropped the hands and turned around and laughed. “No. I love you, and I want you, and we’re here now…”   
  
Erik held out both hands. Charles took them. They moved together, in the flickering light of candleflame and dust.   
  
Erik had very little experience, at least in terms of making love; he’d known rougher encounters enough, everything he’d had to do, everything that’d been about survival and working his way closer to Sebastian Shaw. He did not know how much of that might apply; he ran a hand over a slim freckled hip, tested the fit of Charles’s waist in the span of his palm. Charles, shirtless, ivory and cinnamon and purple handprint-bruises in the dark, smiled.   
  
Charles walked them over to the spectral slab of bed. Flung back the counterpane dramatically. Dust flew; Erik fought back a sneeze, and buried his nose in Charles’s hair.   
  
“I don’t mind dust,” Charles said, and Erik said, “I’ve slept on worse,” and Charles’s fingers tugged off his borrowed nautical shirt and looped curiously into the fastening of his trousers, and he lost the ability to say anything.   
  
Charles, kissing him, made a soft sound: hurt, Erik thought, and pulled back as they hovered beside the bed, trousers mutually undone and jutting ridiculously with desire. “Are you—” He tasted copper and iron. Not his. “Charles—”   
  
Charles touched his lip, made a wry weary face: older and younger by turns, as the candle danced in unseen drafts. “He bit me. It’s all right.”   
  
“He _what_ —”   
  
“It’ll heal. I’ll heal. I want you.”   
  
“Charles,” Erik said again, and Charles looked at him, a look containing all the unvoiced arguments: I might die tomorrow, and if I might die I want to have known this, if I’m marrying Shaw’s monster I want to have known this first with you, and I love you, Erik, let me choose this for myself, let us have this tonight.   
  
“That,” he said, “is unfair,” and Charles said, “Tactics, Erik, you might’ve heard of them,” so Erik reached for him and hauled him in close and kissed him, kissed him until Charles was breathless for every good reason and flushed pink in the dim cool room.   
  
“Bed,” Charles said, and wriggled his hips so that his trousers fell down; Erik caught breath at the shamelessness and loveliness on display. Charles was very human, bathed in shimmering glow and framed by virginal sheets: freckles and hip-bones and pale seventeen-year-old thighs, and the most real part was the way he glanced down at himself, at his stiff swollen cock, and then at Erik, half-blushing, half-proud. “You. Bed. Also.”   
  
“I don’t take orders,” Erik pointed out, “I’m a revolutionary,” and fell to his knees and kissed Charles’s hip, licked the crown of his delectable thick cock, nuzzled a breath into the tangle of dark hair at the base and felt Charles’s hand come to rest very lightly on his head.   
  
“Erik,” Charles said, laughter evident in his voice, “I know,” and Erik couldn’t quite recall what he’d just said, senses suffused with the taste and scent and heat of Charles’s skin.   
  
“Come on,” Charles suggested, fingertips stroking the nape of Erik’s neck. “I want to learn—well, everything. With you. In _bed_.”   
  
Erik breathed out and got up. His knees felt shaky. “You’re the one who did the reading.”   
  
“Reading,” Charles sighed, “hardly the same,” and then let himself fall backwards onto the bed—Erik panicked—and shoved himself up on both elbows. “Remove your trousers? For me. Please.”   
  
Erik, heart in his throat and fluttering crazily, managed, “If you’re asking, Charles, so politely, saying please…” and shoved fabric down clumsily.   
  
He joined Charles on the bed. Charles pushed him to his back and then flopped across him, scattering kisses like trails of bread-crumbs over Erik’s stomach and hips and thighs. The kisses paused, nearing Erik’s shaft. “Ah,” Erik said, because he felt like maybe he needed to say something, but he couldn’t think of words.   
  
“I’ve never seen one before,” Charles observed interestedly, “at least not outside of books. Are they all this size?”   
  
“What—no! Or,” he amended, “I don’t think so?” Not as if he knew. “You never—you and your—the stableboy—”   
  
“Gabriel, and we did some…touching. Extremely hurried clandestine touching. With clothes on.” Charles, naturally, seemed neither dismayed nor intimidated by the situation. Reaching out to touch him, instead: a delighted hand trailing along the head, a finger dipping into wetness at the slit, more fingers closing about Erik’s shaft and giving one slow pump. Erik groaned.    
  
Seventeen, mostly a virgin, and Charles with a single touch had lit up all of Erik’s senses: set nerves to singing, sparked fires in places he’d never known could tingle with love.   
  
“So tell me what you like,” Charles asked, commanded, instructed his knight; and Erik tried to remember anything he _had_ ever liked and to explain with fumbling words. He did not know much and Charles knew less, despite coming up with improbable technical terms for body parts; they discovered together, in strokes and caresses, in licks of tongue and teasings of fingers. Charles wanted, with scientific and intimate passion, to get hands and mouth into everything; Erik, bemused and challenged, tried to give right back every incandescent sensation, and heard Charles laugh and gasp and moan his name, and reveled in these accomplishments. Laughter, in bed. Warmth beside him, beneath him. Talking, because Charles wanted to talk, wanted to know it all.   
  
They tried things they’d both heard of and things they didn’t know anyone’d tried before and things Charles had read about in plain-covered imported exotic books. Erik spread his legs willingly and let Charles slip a finger—coated in slick salve, a jar apparently handed over by the wonderful Hank McCoy before Charles’s departure from the palace—inside him while Charles’s mouth sucked at his cock, ripples of bliss reverberating back and forth; he flipped Charles carefully over and explored the favor in turn but with tongue, tasting even here, as Charles moaned and keened and squirmed and tried to push himself back into the licks and laps. When they rolled back over, Charles grabbed one of Erik’s hands and put it on his own wrist, pinning himself down; Erik hesitated. The candelabra light had illuminated the cut on a lower lip.   
  
“If I’m going to feel it I want to feel you,” Charles said, “not him, I want to be yours, make me feel it, Erik,” and that was a dare and a demand and a plea all in one, encircled in silky night. So Erik collected his other wrist and gathered both up over his head, locking them in place above tumbled dark hair, pressing hard enough to earn another gasp; the gasp melted into a moan, and Charles begged, “More,” and Erik scraped kisses down his throat, his chest, his freckle-dusted pale young body: teeth and marks and love-bruises, pink and hot, inundating them both, giver and receiver, with sensation.   
  
“Will you fuck me?” Charles asked, panting, clumsy with need and sweat, Erik’s mouth a breath from his. “Please.”   
  
“You…” He licked his lips. Bent down to breathe, over Charles’s trusting mouth, the truth: “It can hurt. I don’t want to hurt you.”   
  
“I told you I want to know everything,” Charles said, eyes fearlessly blue. “I trust you.”   
  
If he hurt Charles, he injured the Crown; he could be executed for treason; he was thinking none of that. “I don’t know how to…what to…to make this good. For you.”   
  
“Well,” Charles said logically, lying naked and imperious and hopeful and confident among ancient time-stiff sheets, “we’ve been doing all right so far, we’ll figure it out,” and Erik had to laugh, and the bones of the bed hummed with the sound.   
  
He tested Charles’s salve on his fingers; it made his skin slick and slippery and faintly almond-scented. He stroked a finger over Charles’s body, circling that pink furled muscle; Charles was looser than before, worked over by Erik’s greedy tongue and fingertips, but was new to this, and could not be prepared for the feeling of a man’s prick entering him, forcing him open, battering inside him.   
  
Charles was watching the glide of Erik’s hand. No fear, only open fascination.    
  
Erik pushed one finger inside him, up to the first knuckle, then, because it was easier than expected, the next. Charles gasped. Eyelashes fluttering.    
  
“We’ve done that much already,” Erik said, just to get the reaction, and Charles grinned. “Yes, but it’s different when I’m watching.”   
  
“Is it?”   
  
“Yes. More?”   
  
“Yes.” Two fingers. Scissoring, penetrating, seeking. Ah, there: Charles cried out softly, hands fisting in the sheets. There, again and again; he did not know the precise name for it, but he knew the flashes of coruscating lightning he’d felt once or twice with lumbering graceless partners, and he reasoned that he could keep doing it to Charles over and over, now that he’d found where.   
  
Charles had begun sobbing his name, high and sweet and begging. His hips moved as of their own volition: fucking himself on Erik’s hand. Erik rubbed at that spot, pushed harder into it, testing: sharp shorter jabs, slow drawn-out workings of fingers, different angles. Three fingers, now, and Charles opened readily for him, shivering and twitching and crying out at the barest motion. Oversensitive, Erik thought, relentlessly teasing him; Charles’s skin shimmered with sweat, and his cock was dark and rigid, stiff against his stomach, overflowing a constant pearlescent dribble of fluid over nutmeg freckles: bathed in cream.   
  
“Please,” Charles whispered, “please, I need—I have to—I’m—”   
  
“You wanted me to fuck you, you said.” He took the hand away. Charles glared, speechless: frustrated loss of sensory input, frustrated desire.   
  
“It’ll hurt more,” Erik whispered, “if you have already, if you’re—if it’s too much, too sensitive,” and Charles, after a second of blindly gazing at him, nodded. Trusting, again; Erik swallowed down the knot of emotion in his throat.   
  
He gathered more salve, slicked his cock—noticed blue eyes noticing the movements of his hand—and knelt between moonbeam-pale legs; he could’ve put Charles face-down for this, on hands and knees, easier for a first, but he wanted, needed, to see every reaction, every gasp of pain or pleasure. Charles smiled, clear as the light, and as luminous.   
  
Erik slid into him. Filled him up. Moved together with him.   
  
Charles’s body was tight and hot and unpracticed, but ready and eager and thrilled. They both paused, tremulous; Erik felt rippling muscles struggle and yield, and nearly came. Charles made a tiny fragile sound, a broken jewel, a swallow of candlelight. Erik kissed the corner of his mouth and ceased moving. Charles swallowed again, met his gaze. “I’m fine.”   
  
“Are you?”   
  
“So full…” Charles laughed, this time: brief and amazed. “I like it. Is this…can you…the spot you hit earlier, or does that not work well like this…?”   
  
“Let’s find out,” Erik said, tightness easing inside his chest, emotions uncoiling themselves. “Tell me if you feel it—”   
  
He moved. Charles moved too. They played with positions, angles, deeper and shallower thrusts. Charles was entirely vocal, saying yes and no and go back to that first one, please, oh God Erik, please; Erik, who’d never been vocal in his life and certainly not in bed, stopped once or twice to gaze at him in wonder. Charles blushed an utterly marvelous shade of pink but said, “I could ask you to fuck me harder, I believe I’ve read dialogue to that effect somewhere.”    
  
Erik said, “Someday you’re going to show me exactly what you read for fun, Charles,” and did as requested. Charles cried his name, back arching off the sheets. And Erik loved him and made love to him and was loved by him: Charles’s hands on his shoulders, Charles’s legs around his waist, Charles’s voice moaning and whispering and begging for such filthy things, saying words the three-penny whores down on the docks would’ve blushed to use, words that Erik wanted to try over and over and learn and laugh about while tangled up in hyacinth eyes.   
  
He could tell that Charles was getting close, could see the quivers of tension; his body was aching, balls drawn tight, matching the sight. He was listening to every breath: he knew Charles’s breathing like he’d never known anything else, the way it sounded when Charles was awake or asleep or in pain or unconscious. Charles was not in pain, but Charles was courageous and ecstatic, and a twinge of jagged-stone unbearable tenderness swung back to hit Erik in the chest. He’d seen Charles out of air and dizzy from overexertion before.   
  
And that, something about that—the way that Charles smiled, the way that Erik wanted to keep him safe, the way that Charles let Erik’s hands wrap roughly about freckled wrists while asking for more and more, keeping up with him and challenging him and demanding that he find new ways of caring for this impossible man who could on his own care for a whole kingdom and have room to spare for Erik—   
  
He came, astonished and abrupt, cock pulsing: spilling it all out inside Charles, shuddering through waves of rapture that left him blinded and dazed and confused. He opened his eyes—when had he closed them?—and thought: Charles, I should—Charles—   
  
Charles reached up to touch his face, fingertips skimming damp skin. Charles’s eyes were wide and awed and blue.   
  
“I love you,” Charles panted, and Erik whispered words he only barely recalled, Genoshan words that meant what he needed to say, the word for love he’d held in memory in his mother’s voice, the word he wanted to give freely in return.   
  
He got a hand between them, stroked fumblingly at Charles’s cock, pulled Charles’s hips more roughly against his—he was mostly hard still and the length would be enough, he could find that spot—and Charles gasped and made a sound Erik’d never heard before and came.   
  
Erik watched him, and had no words. The candle-tinted moonbeams splashed gold and silver over long eyelashes, as they swept closed, as they opened.   
  
He gathered Charles into his arms after. Charles made a little grumbly sort of noise and said, “Move your knee.”   
  
“Oh…”   
  
“Just your knee.” Charles kissed his collarbone. “I meant precisely what I said. I feel splendid.”   
  
Erik touched his cheek, thumb lingering near his mouth, a question; Charles said, “What are you talking about, no one but us has any place in this bed, and I want you in my bed always, you understand,” and Erik, heart for the moment weightless as starshine, ran the hand through his hair in reply.   
  
They slept, and woke, and made love again, radiant as dawn. They learned about sore places and acts Charles simply couldn’t attempt—choking on Erik’s cock, as beautiful a sight as that was, left him lightheaded and with a heart-rate that resulted in Erik forcefully halting all exploration for a good ten minutes. They learned that Charles could, even when too tired too soon, lie on his back and plant his heels and thrust upward while Erik carefully slicked himself up and rode him, and Charles’s eyes got huge and possessive at the sight. This was a good look on him, Erik decided, and tried playing with his own nipples just to watch Charles groan and squirm, having been threatened with consequences should he move or exert himself without Erik’s command.   
  
They slept again, worn out and joyous, in the cool flat bed with the white sheets in Emma Frost’s spare townhome, while the sun came up outside.   
  
Erik woke several hours later, hungry and aching in unfamiliar places and indescribably content. The clouds were playing hide-and-seek with patchy sun beyond filmy drapes, and the air was chilly, but chilly in the kind of way that meant life returning to the disused townhome. “Charles,” he said. Charles, head pillowed on Erik’s shoulder, sheet clinging indecently to the curves of his ass, said, “Mmmf.”   
  
“Breakfast.”   
  
“No.”   
  
“Tea?”   
  
“Unfair,” Charles muttered, “just unfair,” and lifted his head slowly. “Tea?”   
  
“You’re not a morning person, are you?” Or, in this case, an afternoon person.   
  
This got him a narrow-eyed sapphire scowl. “Go back to sleep.”   
  
“I thought you wanted tea.”   
  
“I was having an excellent dream,” Charles said. “A dream in which the love of my life awakened me with his mouth on my cock and then brought me tea in bed.”   
  
“Oh really,” Erik said, “did it go something like this,” and flipped his prince onto his back and proceeded to suck at him until Charles cried out, clutching his shoulders, and came, teenage cock spurting long sweet swells into Erik’s mouth. He slid back up on the bed and asked, “Like that?”   
  
“Yes,” Charles said, lazy and boneless and glowing, “except there was tea,” but he put a hand on Erik’s head and ruffled fingers through short strands, and Erik thought he might be glowing too.   
  
“I love you,” Charles said, “and I could—” and then they both stopped for the same exact reason.   
  
“…bacon?”   
  
“Here?” They regarded each other in bafflement for a few seconds.   
  
“No,” Charles said, “it must be next door, no one comes here, you said—she wouldn’t keep the kitchen stocked—”   
  
“She does,” Erik said, “when we meet—when we’re—but no one should be here, they know we were—”   
  
“Hmm,” Charles decided, “let’s find out,” and got up off the bed, wrapping the sheet cheerfully around himself.   
  
_ “What?” _   
  
“They’re cooking bacon, not trying to kill us, and I want tea.”   
  
“What,” Erik said again, faced with the incompatible puzzle pieces of naked Charles and bacon and Emma Frost’s townhouse and possible mid-afternoon home invaders. “Wait,” he added hastily, and dove for the closest article of clothing, which turned out to be his trousers from the previous night. “I’ll go first.”   
  
“Of course,” Charles agreed readily, which should’ve been suspect, but Erik’s brain had remained firmly in the heady molten realm of the taste of Charles on his tongue and the wonderful throb of unfulfilled put-off desire between his own legs, so the tone didn’t register until he started down the staircase and figured out that the Prince of Westchester was right behind him.   
  
“Charles!”   
  
“I agreed you could go first,” Charles said.   
  
“I am,” Erik said, “beginning to sympathize with Hank,” and then kissed him, fierce and wild. “Don’t—just be careful. Please.”   
  
Charles rolled his eyes. “Let you handle any difficulties, you mean. I do carry knives.”   
  
“Not under that sheet you don’t. Unless you’re hiding them someplace I haven’t looked.” Apparently his mouth said words without his consent now, words that came out far too flirtatious.   
  
“Make me tea and let me breathe for a minute,” Charles said, “and you can check again. Toasted cheese?”   
  
“Request, or observation?” The servants’ stairs creaked, which was not a decipherable answer. Erik padded barefoot to the main hall, checked—no burglars with a taste for bacon and toasted cheese in sight—and waved Charles to his side. Charles tipped his head toward the sitting room: voices, his expression noted. Erik nodded.   
  
They ventured over to the door, and Erik put a hand on his hip instinctively and then missed his pistol because he’d left it upstairs, and he mentally swore and tried to figure out how swiftly he could disarm one, two, or five intruders before they could get to Charles, who—   
  
Who was pushing open the door and saying, “Hank?”   
  
Erik ran to catch up, said, “Charles—” and then stopped too, because several bodies were busily munching toasted cheese and bacon sandwiches and beans on toast in the parlor, and he knew all of those bodies.   
  
“Oh,” Charles said, and wrapped his blanket more tightly around himself. Erik, only wearing unbuttoned trousers, panicked, got angry at the panic, and contemplated scooping Charles up and stalking back up the stairs until the rest of the Brotherhood—plus Raven and Hank and Logan, observed the not-shrieking part of his brain—went away. They could leave the bacon. He was ravenous.   
  
“Morning,” Sean called from the nearest chair. “Want tea?”   
  
“That’s five you owe me,” Armando murmured to Alex. Alex was turning bread brown with a toasting fork, held offhandedly over the tiny parlor fire.   
  
“Five pounds?” Charles said, and every person who wasn’t Emma Frost suddenly was preoccupied, gazing everywhere but at their Prince. Emma sipped tea, placid.   
  
Charles put his head on one side, folded arms under the blanket, propped a shoulder on the doorframe, and inquired, “For what? Whether we had sex? I’d’ve thought we were worth more. Erik certainly is.”   
  
“Oh no,” Erik said.    
  
“You’re disagreeing?” Charles’s eyes danced. “I do want tea.”   
  
Erik, nothing left to do but make the best of it, put on his _I will kill you for speaking of this_ face and trailed Charles to the parlor sofa, which Hank obligingly vacated. To keep his hands from expressing murderous thoughts, he poured tea. With extra sugar.   
  
“Um,” Alex confessed, confronted with Charles’s irresistible interested eyes. “About…how soon you’d be up? I was betting we wouldn’t see you at all today. I mean, if you were a—new to—discovering—oh God stop me talking—”   
  
“We made some extremely serendipitous discoveries, yes.” Charles accepted the teacup and Erik’s proprietary arm around his shoulders without quibble. “I quite like having sex with Erik. We have a few favorite positions already, but we’ve not tested every possible option. Yet.”   
  
Erik was extremely glad he was not drinking tea. Might’ve spit it all over Charles.   
  
“More,” Alex said, “than I needed to know. Way more.”   
  
“I mean,” Sean said, sounding fascinated, “Erik. Sex. Erik sex. I can’t imagine.”   
  
“I _can_.”   
  
“Charles,” Hank said.   
  
Charles bestowed a dazzling smile that direction. “Splendid.”   
  
“Oh God,” Alex reiterated.   
  
Emma Frost set her teacup down. “We need to talk.”   
  
“Not about that we don’t,” Erik said.   
  
Emma graced him with glacial impatient disapproval. “About the plan. Last night’s announcement. The timeline. Obviously we’ve some new allies within the palace. We need to talk.”   
  
Charles looked up from blissful communion with his tea. He had a pink-dark smudge on the side of his throat: a mark left by, Erik realized, his own mouth. He tried not to beam proudly; tried not to be inappropriately turned on; tried not to worry about Charles and delicate royal health.   
  
“We do need to talk,” Charles said, not to the tea. “Our endgame may be different, but I think we can all agree that Sebastian ought to be removed, and it would be expedient to join forces.”   
  
Emma nodded, calculating. “Certainly temporary allegiance. We can discuss the ultimate restructuring of Westchester’s government afterwards.”   
  
Charles did not bat an eyelash at this opening sally, only smiled like a genius faced with a chessboard. “We’ll have time to sort out the loyalty of the populace to the traditions and institution of the Crown, and whether that loyalty extends to any lesser nobility, once Sebastian’s gone. Which will need to be public. A private removal will lead to rumors: whether he’s still alive, whether he’ll return, whether he’ll head a counter-revolution.”   
  
Emma’s eyes registered that one: point taken, plus recognition of a worthy opponent. They both knew that Charles’s words could apply to more than one deposed monarch. They both knew Emma was a Lady of the Court. Lesser nobility, to be precise. “Tactically we have an advantage if we wait until you reach your majority; with you on our side and Sebastian no longer Regent—”   
  
“He’ll kill Charles,” Erik said, voice almost unrecognizable even to himself. “Slowly.”   
  
Raven looked as if she might be contemplating Regent-related homicide; Hank looked as if he wanted to check his Prince’s pulse on the spot, but refrained.   
  
“He will,” Charles confirmed. “I wouldn’t survive. I’m decent with a knife, and I’m not a bad shot, but I know I’m not a match for whatever they’ll have arranged. Something that’ll keep me weak, and failing bit by bit. But it doesn’t matter.”   
  
“Like _hell_ —” Erik said.   
  
“I said tactically,” Emma pointed out. “The kingdom won’t survive either, Charles, not many more months of this.”   
  
“I mean it doesn’t matter because I’m not marrying Victor Creed,” Charles said. His hair was standing up, rumpled from Erik’s hands. He looked young and magnificent and transcendent, like a boy general squaring shoulders for war, an emperor wrapped in a makeshift sheet-toga. And they all listened, Erik realized: everyone listened to him. “I won’t.”   
  
“No,” Emma Frost said. “It won’t come to that.” And she hesitated as if she might’ve said more, as if a thought moved behind her habitual façade; Charles’s lips parted on a sudden understanding, not one Erik shared.    
  
“I’m so sorry,” Charles said. “I never—of course I knew, but I was a lot younger when—and I never put together the names, I’m sorry—”   
  
“You had other concerns,” Emma dismissed, but an emotion drifted at the corners of her eyes for a second before being dismissed too. “When is your marriage ceremony? Your birthday?”   
  
“I think so.” Charles nibbled at toasted cheese, eyes abstract. “Obviously I’ve not been in the palace this morning. But Sebastian’ll want to have it done as soon as possible. I become King, technically, the moment I’m of age; the coronation’s only the public acknowledgement. I think he’d rather I wed his minion first, in the hope that it’ll distract me and the public…”   
  
“Why?” That was Sean.   
  
Emma answered. “Because if the public—” Lady Frost was one of the only persons Erik’d met who could make that word sound roughly equal to pond scum. “—becomes aware of Charles as their king, reminded via spectacle, they’ll be more inclined to support his rule. If they never receive that reminder, and the spectacle’s fulfilled by a wedding, they’ll forget. Fickle.”   
  
“So what do we do?” Raven said. She seemed more comfortable than Hank around the Brotherhood; she’d perched on the arm of a brocade chair next to Charles’s corner of the sofa, and was devouring sandwiches without any concern about accepting revolutionary hospitality. Hank kept throwing nervous glances at Lady Frost.   
  
“We do something earlier,” Armando said.   
  
“Like when?”   
  
“Soon,” Charles said. “And unexpected. We’ll be at the opera tonight…not that I’m suggesting tonight, you understand, but for reconnaissance. How alert Sebastian’s guards are, how easily I might be able to distract Victor, that sort of thing.”   
  
“You’ll be at the opera?” Erik hadn’t known.   
  
Charles set down a half-charred square of toast, sighed, poked at it with a fingertip. “Yes. I’d almost forgotten…in fact we should be getting back, it’s, what, half past three, and Sebastian will want to see me before getting dressed…I thought we were simply going to enjoy _La muette de Portici,_ but given recent developments I suspect it’s more an occasion for Victor to parade his prize around and proclaim his gratitude to Sebastian. I shall no doubt be feeling unwell and in need of Victor’s husbandly support.”   
  
“They can’t,” Hank said, “they _can’t_ give you more drugs, not after yesterday, I saw you—”   
  
“They’ll be making a point.” Charles also made a face, shrugged, picked toast back up. “Intriguing; sex must be beneficial for one’s appetite…I’ll do what I can to not let anything work.”   
  
Erik took over the toasting fork and bread. If Charles wanted toast, Charles would have toast, perfectly browned, and not touched by Alex or anyone other than Erik.    
  
Charles gave him an ironic sort of sideways glance that said he knew exactly what those thoughts were, but ate the new toast. Erik felt a pleased sort of shiver tingle its way down his spine: he’d fed Charles, and made love to Charles, and made his Charles smile.   
  
“We’ll be at the theatre,” Emma decided. “Angel’s in the dance corps, of course—” Angel waved and managed a high-kick from her chair. “—and Armando’ll be outside holding carriages, and Sean’s part of the chorus. I shall avail myself of my box. Erik can be among the groundlings.”   
  
Erik, who did not like this plan, stirred in his seat.   
  
“You can’t stand with me,” Charles said. “Victor and Sebastian…”   
  
Erik froze in place and hated the world.   
  
Logan, who’d been idly peeling an apple and staying out of the babble, put down the apple. “Chuck, say the word and I can get you the army.”   
  
Every head swiveled that direction.   
  
“Only him,” Logan said to Emma Frost’s stare. “This ain’t my revolution, and I’m not here to depose my king. And it won’t work without him.”   
  
“Logan,” Charles said, while the parlor walls listened with complete bewilderment, “since when—what—”   
  
“Part of the army,” Logan amended. “And a month ago I wouldn’t’ve promised. Can’t get you the Home Guard, they’re all Sebastian’s, and I ain’t too sure about a lot of the officers. But I _am_ your weapons-master, Chuck, and—”   
  
“I suppose if you can promise the army you can call me Chuck—”   
  
“—and I know a lot of those guys.” Logan picked up his apple again, tossed it high, caught it. “Know who Shaw put in command when he went off to be your Regent? On my recommendation, ’cause the moron stopped giving a damn once the wars were all won. Captain Steven Rogers.”   
  
Charles put his head on one side, considering. “I’ve met Captain Rogers. At official functions.”   
  
“Yep. We go back a ways. Him and James Barnes.”   
  
“I don’t think I’ve met James Barnes…?”   
  
“You haven’t. But you don’t get one without the other, not these days.” Logan pondered the shininess of the apple. “Y’know that petition you signed when Shaw was in Wakanda? The one about extra allocations for military hospitals, for veterans of the Regent’s damn stupid wars, all that? So the kid, Rogers’ husband, not that he was his husband then, he lost an arm, had all kinds of bad prisoner of war shit go down, real nasty. You funded a veterans’ hospital, Chuck.”   
  
“Oh,” Charles breathed, “oh, that poor boy,” and nobody in the room had the heart to point out _Charles, you’re seventeen,_ though Sean did open his mouth and then stop.   
  
“Anyway,” Logan said, “they’re loyal to the Crown and the _idea_ of the Crown, to good kings, good leadership, and Charles here specifically. They could give a flying fuck-all for the Regent trying to _steal_ the Crown.”   
  
“What’s a flying fuck-all, exactly?” Sean inquired.   
  
“You’re not old enough to know,” Logan said without missing a beat. “Give me a couple days to poke around, Chuck.”   
  
“And to threaten us,” Emma said. “Because it is, is it not, Mr Howlett? The army. Not for us. For Charles.”   
  
“Yep,” Logan said. Calm.    
  
“Oh, Logan,” Charles said. “But…yes, fine. It is a threat. If it needs to be. I’m partial to myself remaining alive at the end of all this, no offense.”   
  
Emma might’ve been marginally amused. Hard to tell. She sipped tea, and smiled. “None taken.”   
  
“Hey, Charles,” Armando said, leaning back against Alex’s legs, “you wouldn’t know who writes the Professor X editorials, would you? We figured it had to be someone with insider Court knowledge, but we could never guess who.”   
  
Charles started laughing. And then had to explain his authorial alter ego, which took them through the end of the tea and bacon sandwiches, up until Hank and Raven started making meaningful noises about time to leave and Shaw’s minions stopping by palace rooms. Erik found a shirt and said, “I’ll walk you back,” and Logan said, “You know we were just gonna say he was out with me, I’m here for plausible alibi creation, but be my guest,” and lit up a cigar.   
  
Erik walked him back. Erik kissed him in the slender twining dirty City alleyways and in the deep rich dark of their tunnel, kissed him and couldn’t shake the inevitable leaden sense of doom that sunk deep into his gut as he watched Charles go. He said Charles’s name, an impulse; blue eyes paused and turned and flung themselves back into his arms.   
  
“I love you,” Charles said.    
  
“Yes,” Erik said, “I thought you might.”   
  
Charles punched him in the shoulder.    
  
“I love you,” Erik said. “More than—I don’t know. More than Sean loves bacon sandwiches. I’m not good at this, Charles.”   
  
“I think,” Charles said, “you were quite good,” and added a ridiculous eyebrow-waggle that made Erik’s stomach do perilous swoops. “And I rather like not being a virgin. Can we do it again?”   
  
“What, now?”   
  
“In the tunnel?”   
  
They both considered practicalities, for a minute.   
  
Erik sighed.    
  
Charles sighed, too, said, “I’d better get back,” and slid a hand across the duly tented front of Erik’s trousers, teasing. “Later. After the opera. Come find me. My rooms.”   
  
“I can bring you a pineapple,” Erik said, and watched Charles laugh, open and full-bodied and elated and not infirm at all. 

He kept tight hold of that laugh throughout the agonizing crawl of the evening. Broken glass and scratching unease. The itch of his borrowed wool coat crept down between his shoulderblades and burrowed in. Charles was late. The entire palace contingent was, in fact. He could imagine too many reasons why, standing restlessly according to plan among the throng of the pit.   
  
The Royal Opera House stretched crystal and gold spires to the sky, resembling nothing so much as a spider’s wedding-cake; it prospered, because Shaw enjoyed opera, and what Shaw enjoyed tended to prosper. The boxes along the interior walls shimmered with red and gold draperies, festooned with silk roses, drooping with elegant limpid curtains. Erik, standing in the crowded noisy pit shoulder-to-shoulder with penny-admission masses, refused to move as someone jostled his shoulder. He was staring up at the royal box.    
  
And Charles was late.   
  
The opera had begun: music swelling and stirring, sensationalist nationalist heartstrings being tugged. A mute girl, ravished and abandoned, pleading for justice. A riot in city streets. A volcano looming ominously, belching oily black smoke that presaged melodrama. Erik was skeptical of this volcano. He’d seen men coming and going with firework-boxes and portentous chemical symbols. He was privately estimating how quickly he could swing up to the royal box and grab his prince before the theatre burnt to a crisp.   
  
And Charles continued to be late.   
  
On stage, the heroine’s brother swore revenge, at length, in laborious melodic song. Sean’s voice floated in among the male chorus; Angel’d been among the corps de ballet earlier, twirling bits of dandelion fluff introducing the act. Erik watched the empty space, the plump carnelian and gilt cushions where Charles wasn’t.    
  
Someone else stepped on his foot; the commoners were cheering at pretty much any hint of action that wasn’t two men standing still and singing at each other. They were also cheering, more ominously, at the undertones of riot and revolution and throwing aristocratic seducers out for good. Erik hoped Shaw’s spies weren’t listening. He also hoped the theatre owners had invested in body armor.   
  
He wondered whether Charles had written to a theatre troupe, the way he’d written to University masters, and made a casual suggestion about their repertoire.   
  
He scowled at the nameless scruffy man who tried to clap him enthusiastically on the shoulder. The man backed off.   
  
The door at the back of the opera-box opened. Charles and the Regent Sebastian Shaw and Victor Creed came in.    
  
They were all dressed in fine suits, royal suits; Shaw was smiling, joking, laughing. Creed had a meaty hand fastened around Charles’s upper arm, and wore his evening attire like a brick wall might. Charles…   
  
Charles was chalk-white: pale in the way that broken stone and ancient dry hills might be pale, on his feet through visible bedrock-deep willpower. Even from a distance Erik could see the bruise on his cheek.   
  
He wanted to scream. He remained silent. Shaw had two bodyguards; Charles had none, not even Raven at his side. Of course his fiancé would be enough to protect him. Of _course_.   
  
The opera flowed and ebbed and unspooled into music and tragedy around them.   
  
Two bodyguards, Erik thought. Plus Creed. We could handle two bodyguards. If Charles—   
  
Charles was holding himself together with no threads at all, shredded patchwork. Whatever they’d given him or forced on him, he wouldn’t be able to fight.   
  
Emma Frost’s box happened to be two away from the royal one. She was watching, too: opera glasses held in her lap amid tufts of white lace and diamonds, eyes on Victor Creed’s hand on Charles’s arm.   
  
Shaw sat. The orchestra played an out-of-place flourish to acknowledge the honor. The volcano rumbled uneasily, unwell.   
  
Victor Creed sat down gracelessly, and yanked Charles into his lap. Charles, unprepared, stumbled and was caught. Creed laughed, took Charles’s arm, draped it around his neck: a doll to be arranged. Charles shivered, revulsion plain; Creed smiled. Creed liked it.   
  
Erik wanted to erupt, like the volcano: wanted to pull the pistol from his pocket, wanted to fly up there and aim it squarely between Creed’s eyes—   
  
Creed’s. Not Shaw’s? Not when Shaw sat beside him?   
  
Dizzy and in need of air, he tore his gaze away from the man he loved for a second, only a second, head spinning.   
  
The eponymous Mute Girl wept and struggled and made a moral choice: to protect the man who’d ravished her from the angry mob wanting his head. This choice led to consequences. Her brother poisoned. Both of them rejected by the revolution as harborers of the enemy. She danced, dreadful and helpless, across the stage.   
  
When Erik looked back, Creed was holding a glass of champagne to Charles’s lips. Forcing him to drink. To keep drinking.   
  
Emma Frost was sitting motionless, hand tight around her opera glasses; she did not pretend to be looking at the story, or at Erik, or indeed at anything other than the cruelty playing itself out amid gilt plushness and crystal champagne-flutes. Erik remembered, a stray thought for no immediately understandable reason, Charles saying _I’m so sorry, I knew the names but I never knew…_   
  
Knew what?   
  
The Mute Girl flung herself violently into the volcano, spectacular self-immolation as pyrotechnic flames bubbled up.   
  
Victor Creed set down the champagne, wrapped a bestial hand around Charles’s throat as Charles swallowed, said something. Snickered, gloating: holding that life in his hand, in public, while the Regent looked on, entertained.   
  
Charles, Erik’s lips and heart said. His pistol was in his hand. Plans be damned. Only now mattered.   
  
A shot rang out. Bullet-sharp and brutal amid soaring crescendos.   
  
Erik blinked. He hadn’t—no, he _hadn’t_ fired, no residue on his hand, no ringing in his ears, but—   
  
Creed moved, at the last possible second: hand lifting, body bending to the left to get more champagne.   
  
The bullet buried itself in the meat of his shoulder. He bellowed. The opera skidded to a halt, disarrayed, music falling over itself like torn flounces; Erik saw Emma Frost stand up, unperturbed as ever, and slip a derringer back into her purse, and start to make her way to an exit.   
  
Emma? But why, _why_ —   
  
No. He had to find Charles. The crowd had turned frantic, hysterical, surging around him: groundlings shrieking of gunshots and riots and death coming for them all. Bodies crashed and collided; ladies fainted decorously.   
  
Creed, furious and bleeding, had grabbed Charles’s wrists. Was pinning him against the box’s railing: snarling demands, asking why Charles hadn’t been more surprised or what Charles knew about hired assassins; Erik couldn’t tell. Charles was fighting but couldn’t get away. Creed shook him, hard enough that his head snapped back, body crushed into the unyielding curve of the balcony.   
  
Erik shoved his way past flailing human limbs of the incipient havoc. Stairs, he thought; and then the volcano made its displeasure at being left unattended extremely loudly known, groaning and burbling, and this time he thought, not quite consciously: pyrotechnics, fire, chemicals—   
  
The volcano went up in flames. The old wooden bones, the fine silk draperies, the greasepaint and toeshoes of the theatre burst into untimely conflagration.    
  
The Opera House burned, in the night.   
  
The initial panic became an upheaval. A mob. A heaving beast suffocating in smoke and ash.   
  
Erik resorted to kicking, punching, biting, waving the pistol, anything and everything; he got to the far wall and found Emma Frost, gown no longer white but grey with apocalypse. “You—”   
  
“The back exit’s stuck.” She was coughing, ladylike and annoyed at the presence of fire in the world. “I don’t know where they went.”   
  
“What,” Erik hissed, hands slamming her up against the wall, “did. You. _Do_.”   
  
“My brother—I couldn’t—and now Charles—” Emma Frost met his rage with pure ice. “Victor Creed should never be allowed to touch another boy again.”   
  
“So you tried to shoot him _now?_ ”   
  
The world billowed in sheets of omnivorous flame. In their corner of the blaze, Erik pulled off his shirt, wrapped it over his mouth and nose, tried to breathe. If _he_ couldn’t—oh, G-d, Charles—   
  
“I had to.” Emma’s mask cracked, at last. Spilling raw love and grief and a pain that’d waited years and boiled over in the end. “I couldn’t watch—”   
  
“I would have done it,” Erik admitted, but shoved her away hard: you’re not forgiven. She regained balance as if he’d merely let her go in a dance. “Where will they go?”   
  
“The palace,” Emma guessed. Part of the ceiling fell in. Screams arose. The ending of one world, in liquid red and yellow heat. “Safety. It’s practically impregnable. Erik—”   
  
“So we’re going to the palace,” Erik said, because infernos would not stand between him and what he wanted, not tonight. He ignored the blaze, dragged Emma toward the broken door. “Tonight. Now.”   
  
He thought: Charles. Shaw, made vulnerable by confusion and rioting, and Charles. Tonight. Not in the future, not in the next six months, not whenever Logan could summon the army. Tonight the Regent Sebastian Shaw would be only another body. Another life lost, unheeded, as everything crumbled and changed and died in a haze of smoke.   
  
He kicked at the door, kicked again, felt weakened timbers give. They stumbled out, soot-streaked and coughing. The alleyway behind the theatre glimmered like the gates of hell. He pressed hands to his eyes, as they watered.   
  
Everything he wanted. Here on the precipice. He demanded, eyes burning, chest burning, “Get everyone. Meet me there,” and ran for the palace, for his way in, for the way Charles had shown him. He felt the city drowning in eruptions of flame and fear at his back, and he did not look; Charles would care, Charles would always care, but Charles had to be alive in order to care.   
  
He found a familiar house, a street-sign, a building to scale. He spotted an abandoned portable tea-mug on the ground, dirty and cracked. He did not know whether it’d been Charles’s, dropped on the afternoon they’d kissed, the afternoon of rain and sweetness; weeks later, surely not, but his heart broke all the same: he was seeing Creed’s hands clamped around slim wrists, the stain of a backhand across a pale cheek.   
  
He swung himself up onto the roof, coughing smoke and soot, tasting ash, and threw himself over the side into the waiting dark.


	11. like drinking copper and ash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles couldn’t breathe. This was not a new sensation, but the cause was: smoke and soot clogging the air. Flames licking greedily at the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Er...apologies for the delay. Life, plus other fandoms. *sigh* Anyway, a couple chapters left--this is the worst one, and the last cliffhanger. I swear. :D
> 
> **Warnings for** : Victor Creed attempting non-consensual sex with Charles (Charles gets away, courtesy of a knife), lots of hurt!Charles, um, deaths of Evil People (trying to avoid spoilers)?

Charles couldn’t breathe.  
  
This was not a new sensation, but the cause was: smoke and soot clogging the air. Flames licking greedily at the sky.  
  
Those people, he thought, oh God the people—and he tried to turn toward the Opera House, forgetting for a moment.  
  
Victor Creed’s hand crushed him against the filthy alley wall. “Where d’you think you’re going, boy?”  
  
“We need to evacuate the—”  
  
“So a theatre burns.” Creed’s face flickered, made unholy by firegleam and shadow and blood. His shoulder was a mess of blood as well, crimson smears across crushed velvet. “No one cares.” For good measure, he kicked a rubbish bin; it fell across the back-alley door, a casual death-sentence for those on the other side. “More interested in you, right now.”  
  
“Ask me anything you want,” Charles said, desperate, “but call the fire brigade, or—”  
  
Creed backhanded him. Hard.  
  
Charles, already dizzy from the lack of oxygen, from opium-laced wine force-fed him at supper, fell. Or would’ve, if Creed’s other hand hadn’t seized his wrist and jerked him upright. “If you’re going to have someone shoot at me make sure they don’t miss, boy.”  
  
“I didn’t have anything to do with—”  
  
“Don’t believe you.”  
  
“It’s true!” It wasn’t. Or it was and it wasn’t; of course he’d known Emma was present, of course he’d known about the revolutionary element secreted among theatergoers. It’d been his own idea. He’d not expected anyone to try to shoot Victor Creed.  
  
He should have. He did remember Emma’s brother. Beautiful, Emma’s brother. Given, in an arranged marriage, by the Regent to Victor Creed. Christian Frost was dead now.  
  
Creed hauled him bodily away from the inferno that’d once been the Opera House. Charles, stumbling, thought at first that they must be headed to the palace; but then he blinked and saw a street sign through haze…  
  
He was shoved into a doorway. A shop. A milliner’s: lace and netting and hat-frames floated incongruously over the scene, stretched on racks. The occupants had already fled, either in terror of the fire or of Victor Creed.  
  
Who slammed him down hard on a counter. Charles struggled, couldn’t find air through new shock, felt every muscle scream in agony. He put out a hand, blindly; lace tore.  
  
“You’re going to be my husband,” Creed said. “You know, Highness, there’s no such thing as consent between a man and his husband. You know you have no right to refuse your marital duty. Whenever I ask.”  
  
“Fuck you,” Charles hissed, prone and furious.  
  
“Other way around,” his fiancé snarled, “unless you talk. Nobody’ll look twice at me for it. Not when Sebastian hates you. Maybe even _if_ you talk. Make you listen.”  
  
“That’s hardly…incentive to give in, is it…Victor, you idiot, the whole City’s going up in flames—”  
  
“The City’s survived before.” Creed grinned. This was not a pleasant expression. His hands gripped Charles’s hips with bruising force. “You might not. Delicate little toy.”  
  
Erik, Charles thought. Oh, Erik. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I hope you’re safe, I hope you got out—  
  
He retorted, “You can’t kill me until after we’re married,” and Creed didn’t listen, only crowded closer, foul weight and breath like the pits of hell, smoky and sulfurous. Charles said, this time, “Stop,” and tried to fight back, tried with every remaining ounce of strength. Creed tore open his shirt; put a hand on his trousers.   
  
“I can tell you what I know—” Charles said.  
  
Creed paused, smirked. Put a meaty hand over his mouth, cutting off words. Over mouth and nose, cutting off breath. Charles struggled, instinctive and terrified. “You will anyway.”  
  
But the palm lifted from his face; he drank in ash-filled gulps of air, limp and dazed, dimly aware of Creed’s hands on his body, stripping him—  
  
But that meant both those hands were occupied, and so Charles said, “I know this was a very bad idea for you,” and closed fingers around the hilt of the knife Raven’d given to him, the knife he’d hidden up an elegant sleeve earlier that evening, and used it.  
  
He couldn’t be very accurate, given pre-theatre opium tinctures and smoke inhalation and considerable physical trauma; but he didn’t need to be. Creed was right on top of him, after all.  
  
Charles kicked the spasming bulk away, rolled off the counter, crumpled to the ground. Creed wasn’t dead; as Charles landed beside him, he growled with feral rage. Blood poured from the hole in his side, and from the older one in his shoulder; he punched like an avalanche even so. Charles tried to crawl; got hit again; shook a leg free of demented grip.   
  
Creed howled after him as he stumbled through the door.  
  
Heat scorched his face, out in the streets. Lost figures and fire-sirens wailed. Flame-wreaths and smoke turned the City black and orange as an autumn masque; the Crown Prince of Westchester became one more broken body amid a sea of them, running the wrong way, against the tide.  
  
He coughed again. Put fingers to his lips, after. Red. Something wrong inside. Lungs, or that last blow of Creed’s, or the first slam of his body against a theater balcony; it did not matter.   
  
Erik, he thought. Where would Erik go? His thoughts answered: the palace. Either looking for you, or looking for Sebastian. Both paths led to the royal residence.  
  
He couldn’t run.  
  
He found a horse. She was tied to a broken carriage on the King’s Road, whinnying in despair. He could ride; he’d learned years ago, though he’d been mostly too ill to practice. He untangled carriage reins with trembling hands.  
  
She did not want to be guided toward the palace—it was not quite in the direction of the fire, but not away either—but he was stubborn and patient, and she was well-trained; he clung to her neck. The monument to sprawling royal power rose like a monolith ahead of them; sirens screamed across the City, and steam rose. The fire brigade, he understood fuzzily. Water. Citizens mobilizing. They couldn’t stop the blaze, not in the tinderbox old-town sections, but they could contain it. Good for them. For trying.  
  
His horse, having done noble duty, refused to get any closer. Charles slid down, thanked her silently, turned her loose to run. Pushed himself up and over his favorite convenient wall, hit the ground, coughed. He used the sleeve of his once-expensive royal-linen shirt to blot away red this time. The shirt Creed had ripped so easily.  
  
He wasn’t sure how badly he was hurt. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.   
  
His trousers were broken too, no longer fastened, but they were staying up. He’d put a knife into Victor Creed. And he was alive.  
  
He was alive, and so he needed to get up; he let himself shake apart for two seconds, forcing back the sensation of thick hands upon his waist, and then he did get up, bit by bit.   
  
Where _would_ Erik go? Charles’s own rooms? Or after the Regent?   
  
He knew Erik loved him. He knew how badly Erik wanted Sebastian dead, had wanted that before they’d ever met; he knew how easy it’d be to hide a body in riotous confusion.  
  
He made a choice.  
  
The tunnel felt dark and damp and secure; here, he was beneath the half-hearted old moat, the thick loam of soil. Old stories, old bones, earth-rich. If they could hide people here, safeguarded from the flames—  
  
Later. He promised himself that, without considering the irony.  
  
He fell once or twice. He got back up. He shoved aside tapestries and treasure-boxes; he left secret doors open, because the secrets were all open now, for good or ill.  
  
The door to his rooms lay open too, as if someone’d been there. No one was. He stared at toppled microscopes and tumbled books for a moment, stupidly. Then he did run. As best he could.  
  
Left, he thought. No. Right, then left. Maps. Secrets. Bloody paranoid Xavier ancestors—  
  
His head throbbed. He didn’t recall a specific impact, but something about the hurt felt frightening, as if it’d gotten lighter, emptier. He had to stop to consciously remember a turn he’d memorized years ago.  
  
The door in front of him opened into the throne room. It was the less subtle of the two. Sebastian knew about it. Charles wasn’t trying for stealth. Not now.  
  
Oh, Erik, his heart pleaded. Erik, what’ve you done?  
  
He hoped Erik had gone to his rooms first. He hoped that his current guess was wrong. He hoped that Erik had chosen him, first, at least at first. He knew that was only a hope. No foundation.  
  
He put a hand on the door. His knees gave way before he could open it. He sank to the dry stone of the centuries-old tunnel. He coughed, and then he felt dizzy, a wave of nausea; when he touched the back of his head he felt something wet and hot, though he couldn’t remember what. A glimpse of blood on a countertop, on a black-and-white striped bolt of satin, flitted past his vision.   
  
He could hear voices.  
  
He got up. It was not easy.   
  
He touched the seam of the tunnel door, and pushed, and it swung.  
  
At first no one noticed him. Too much chaos. Courtiers and hangers-on, taking refuge in solid stone walls. Guardsmen, Sebastian’s own, barricading doors; keeping the citizens at bay beyond. Shouting and burned silk and scorched opera-plume feathers.  
  
Sebastian at the heart of the throne room. Sebastian alone, a cool oasis of disinterest in a formally tailored evening suit, ignoring the crisis and the babble and the cries of wounded men and women.   
  
Sebastian alone, so where was—   
  
Erik had to’ve made it out of the theatre. Erik couldn’t be—  
  
He’d been standing too still for too long. Heads turned his way. Gradually, a hush fell.  
  
Sebastian turned too, unhurriedly. “Charles. Alive, I see.”  
  
“No thanks to your lapdog.”  
  
“Is your husband dead, then?”  
  
“He’s not—” He had to cough. Muffled in a sleeve. “He wasn’t. My husband.”  
  
“If he’s alive, he will be.” Serene as if the future wasn’t burning; Sebastian’s gaze pretended, even now, to be benevolent. “Surely you see that you need a firm hand. Look at the state of you. Poor boy.”  
  
A few of the courtiers—the ones who knew Victor Creed’s tastes—stirred uneasily.  
  
“Come sit down,” Sebastian invited, hand held out: avuncular concern. “I’ll fetch Doctor Essex to see to you.”  
  
“ _Charles_ ,” a familiar voice said, and Hank and Raven shoved themselves through the crowd; too far away to be of aid, but he appreciated the gesture. The room spun, one blurry revolution.  
  
Revolution. He nearly laughed.  
  
“Charles,” another person said, and he knew that voice, stunned and full of shock and love as it was: that was Erik’s voice.  
  
He blinked. He couldn’t see Erik. And then he could; Erik was soot-covered and had a nasty burn along one arm, but was there and real, stretching out hands even as pale eyes filled with horror. “Charles, you—are you—how _bad_ —”  
  
“Very touching,” Sebastian said, “but treasonous,” and nodded at the nearest guardsmen. “Arrest them both as revolutionaries. Try not to hurt the Prince, he’s obviously been misled by unfortunate emotions, weak as he is.”  
  
In an eyeblink Erik had a gun. Pointed squarely at Sebastian. “If anyone moves you die.”  
  
“Erik,” Charles whispered.  
  
“You can’t kill me,” Sebastian said. “Here, in the throne room, when I’m unarmed…you’ll be a murderer.”  
  
“I’ve been that before,” Erik said. Emma Frost and Azazel and Janos and the other Brotherhood members materialized out of the crowd. They stood at Erik’s side.  
  
“You’ll kill a man with no weapon,” Sebastian said, “in a room full of my guards, some frightened children, other traitors, spies, and your lover…tell me, what do you hope to accomplish by making me a martyr?”  
  
“You?” Erik practically spit the word. “You’re not a martyr. You killed my mother.”  
  
“I’ve killed quite a few people,” Sebastian said. “I was, after all, a general. Charles, stop this nonsense; he obviously has no plan beyond this moment, and you’ll both die screaming.”  
  
“Erik,” Charles said, hand uselessly at his own throat, at his lips, as if that’d help him breathe. “Erik, you can’t. Not like this.”  
  
Erik didn’t look away from Sebastian. Didn’t turn. “He’s a monster.”  
  
“And we’ll execute him as one. After a trial.”  
  
“A trial?” Erik’s voice could’ve split stone. “Charles, I love you. But you’re wrong. There’s no trial for this.”  
  
“This—” He couldn’t hear his own voice. He coughed; it felt like coming apart. Someone gasped; he saw all the blood, then. Erik, who did not turn, did not. “This needs to be done in the open. Where everyone can see.”  
  
“They can see his _body_.”  
  
Sebastian smiled.  
  
“He deserves to die,” Charles said, “I’m not arguing that, I know he hurt you, I _know_ , Erik, I love you, but you’re not the only one he’s hurt,” and then couldn’t stand.   
  
Erik started to turn, at the sound; as his pistol wavered, Sebastian took a step.  
  
Erik swung back that way. “ _No_.”  
  
“Please,” Charles said, on one knee, not begging, only asking. He loved Erik; he always would. “ _He_ kills unarmed people. You’re _better_ than him. We have to be.”  
  
Erik did look back, at that.  
  
And his face went white. “ _Charles_ —”  
  
Sebastian took a step toward the passage door; Erik lunged a step forward; Sebastian, not unarmed after all but lying about that too, lifted a pistol, fired.  
  
The bullet, Charles thought, hadn’t hit Erik; Erik wasn’t bleeding, though Erik’s gun also cracked in reply—  
  
And then he wasn’t kneeling anymore, but lying on the ground instead, the world turning to grey ribbons.  
  
Sebastian’d missed or the pistol’d misfired; but it’d still been enough. His leg, the one he’d been kneeling on—  
  
The bullet’d gone through his thigh. That part wasn’t fatal. Everything together just might be, combined. He thought he might be drowning in pain, or something like pain, bright and scarlet.  
  
“Charles—” Erik’s voice. “Charles?” Followed by cursing, multilingual, frantic. “Get Hank—Charles, Charles, look at me, stay with me—Sebastian’s dead, he can’t hurt you now—Charles, please!”  
  
“I love you,” Charles said, very weakly.   
  
“Please don’t leave me,” Erik whispered. “Charles—I looked for you first. You know that, please say you know that, I went to your rooms before I came here, I thought Shaw might have you with him—”  
  
“I know,” Charles told him. “Of course I know.”  
  
Hank was there too, and Raven, and Emma. They knelt around him. Sebastian’s guards, leaderless, were quite intelligently fleeing the scene. The barricades at the doors failed; fire-tattered bodies of all classes and professions poured in, seeking shelter at Westchester’s oldest heart.  
  
Someone else, someone in the background, some Court lady or smoke-smudged refugee, an unknown citizen of the City, breathed, “If the Heir dies—”  
  
Someone else whispered, “What happens now?”  
 


	12. the future in lemon biscuits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which no one dies and Erik gets a new title.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For [avictoriangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/avictoriangirl/pseuds/avictoriangirl), as a birthday-present, though I was going to post this one soon anyway, so I feel like you should ask for something else! <3

“He’s not dead,” Erik said. “He’s _not dead_ —”  
  
Charles wasn’t. Charles was even still conscious, though Erik couldn’t imagine how. He didn’t know where that strength came from, what deep miraculous reservoir could be left to tap.   
  
He didn’t know where to touch. Blood painted so many parts of Charles: the mess of bullet-hole that was his thigh, the splash of drying crimson across his chest and stomach, the red on his mouth and chin where he’d been coughing, the ugly dark wound Erik hadn’t noticed at the back of his head where hair was matted and wet—  
  
Charles’ trousers were broken, he noticed. He hadn’t seen that before. Such a small thing: missing buttons, a tear at the waist. And Charles had been dragged out of the Opera House by Victor Creed.  
  
Rage swam over his vision.  
  
“Erik,” Charles was saying, or trying to. He couldn’t talk well. Hank was ripping someone’s petticoat into bandages. “Erik, you—”  
  
“Don’t talk,” Erik whispered. “Don’t—oh, Charles, Charles, please, lie still, you’ll make it worse—”  
  
You’ll make it worse? What kind of comforting talk was that? He hated himself; he hated that he did not know how to think in gentle comforting unrealistic tones. He should’ve said: you’ll be all right. He should’ve said: I’m here, I’m holding your hand, I have you safe.  
  
He whispered, “I love you.” If he could only say true words, those were the truest.  
  
“I know…you do,” Charles said, and coughed up more red. Erik died inside, every place that was useless and could not save those blue eyes.  
  
Charles, lying on the cold floor in the smoky refugee-filled room in front of the throne that should be his, shifted his gaze. Looked at Hank. Hank bit his lip, sent back an expression that was honest and seemed to indicate that he did not know, one way or the other, and put more pressure on the thigh-wound.  
  
“Emma,” Charles said, loudly enough that bystanders heard; they parted. Emma came forward in a rush of soot-stained formal gown, and knelt at his side; she was surprised to’ve been summoned, but maybe only Erik could tell.   
  
He was surprised. He felt the world lurching out of control. Sebastian dead. His mission over. Charles—not dead, G-d, no, not—and asking for Lady Frost instead of him.  
  
Charles panted, through obvious dizziness, “The Regent is dead…and I’m not of age but…I think I’m close enough…unless anyone here would like to argue with me?”  
  
No one did; if anyone wanted to, they did not stir in time, and the moment was lost.  
  
Emma Frost bowed her head. Behind them, in the crowd, Logan knelt.  
  
So did a blond man wearing the insignia of a commander, and the dark-haired quiet shadow at his side. The army, Erik thought. The army; and the rustle of kneeling rippled through the room, and spread like an inevitable wave.  
  
“Good…while we’re all here…I’m formally assuming the office…of the monarchy…” Charles stopped to breathe. “As my first act…I’m naming Erik Lehnsherr a Baron—shut up, Erik—and appointing him…Minister for Genoshan Foreign Affairs and Refugees…and you can bloody well be on my Small Council too…you and Emma.”  
  
Emma nodded slowly. As Lady Frost, her Court reputation, her public reputation, was impeccable; she had heard her king’s commands, and a few other Court nobles within earshot had heard her hear them. Whether Charles survived or not would be immaterial; as king, even for a few moments, he’d just redirected foreign and domestic policy.   
  
He’d also defanged the Brotherhood. He’d put a revolutionary on the Small Council. Knowingly so.  
  
“We’ll worry about succession reform later,” Charles said, and his eyelashes fluttered. Erik gripped his hand, and begged, “Charles—”  
  
“Right now I need my Small Council to handle the fire brigade and the wounded,” Charles whispered, and his eyes shut, and did not open.  
  
“You’re the fucking wounded!” Erik shouted. He got no response.  
  
Hank looked up, hands wet with Charles’s blood, and said, “I need to take him to the infirmary.”  
  
“Will he—”  
  
_“I don’t know.”_  
  
“Go,” Emma said. Her face was pale.  
  
Erik took a breath, gazed at Charles’s unconscious face, let it out. “I’ll come right after you.”  
  
Hank and Raven left, carrying their king.  
  
Erik heard his voice as if from a distance, disembodied. He gave orders. He gave the orders he knew Charles would want; he gave them with the authority Charles had just given to him. He demanded that the palace gates and underground chambers be opened, cool moat-damp refuge from Citywide flames. He commanded anyone with any kind of medical expertise, University students and veterinarians and apothecaries, down to the infirmary. He sent Captain Rogers and James Barnes out to organize a military draining of the moat and soaking of structures in the fire’s path and creation of a firebreak and rescue of civilians according to their best judgment.   
  
He thought that Charles would want the University protected. He told them to save it if they could.  
  
He heard Emma taking over, effortlessly, the management of resources inside the palace, distributing blankets and ordering tea and lemon biscuits and cold sandwiches for everyone from the kitchens. A means to calm milling frightened escapees from fire, he thought. A neat strategic move to show confidence in the situation. That bizarre Westchester preference for leaves in hot water, and he thought; oh, Charles—  
  
After many blazing heat-scorched hours the fire dwindled, shrunk, was fought down. The City survived, a weathered soot-scorched phoenix spreading wings amid ashes.   
  
The Opera House and the theatre district were gone. Most of Tailors’ Row and the milliners’ high-fashion district were also gutted. Most residences, the docks, the main market square, both Queen’s and City Hospital, the palace and the King’s Road, and the University, had all lasted through the night. Only six deaths had been reported.  
  
Erik touched the closest castle page—Kitty, her name was—on the shoulder, told her he’d be in the infirmary, and ran.  
  
The infirmary swarmed with injuries, with scampering bodies in service, with moans of the burned or half-suffocated or broken by runaway carts. White bedsheets flapped like ghosts. Dawn poured in mercilessly clear and cold. Erik tried not to get in anyone’s way—he was singleminded but he knew Charles wouldn’t want anyone else hurt because of him—and staggered to Hank’s side.  
  
“How—”  
  
“I still don’t know.” Hank gave a weary shrug: barely a motion, as if the long night had attenuated even that gesture to bone. “I _don’t_. He’s sleeping—I gave him something for that. He’s not in pain.”  
  
Erik begged, mutely.  
  
Hank spread hands. Every inch of him screamed weariness, and refusal to give in. Drying scarlet stained his shirt; Erik did not know whose. “He woke up for a few minutes when we brought him down here. He’s got blood in his veins from half the people in this room. He would’ve died otherwise; he was bleeding too much. We saved the leg but he’ll never walk without assistance. I can tell you that right now. His lungs can’t take smoke like this. His head wound—I don’t like it. But on the brighter side, if you can call it that—he wasn’t—Creed didn’t get to—” With something like the phantom of a laugh: “Creed tried to rape him. I’m too tired for niceties. That’s what it was. Charles stabbed him before he got very far. Thank God he carries knives.”  
  
Erik staggered, couldn’t inhale right: mingled relief and horror rushing in.  
  
“I honestly don’t know.” Hank shut his eyes, opened them, looked at his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. “He’s fighting. He just—he doesn’t have much left to draw on. Erik, I’m sorry. You should—you should be prepared.”  
  
“I’m prepared for him to _live_ ,” Erik snapped. He was Charles’s Minister now; he had helped save the City of Westchester, which was not even his home, but was Charles’s.   
  
He sat on the side of Charles’s infirmary bed. He took one limp pale hand in his.  
  
He waited.  
  
He waited.  
  
He waved a lemon tea-biscuit under Charles’s nose.  
  
He said, “I love you, Charles, I know you know that.”  
  
He said, “Your fucking City is fucking safe, you gave those orders, you wouldn’t rest until you had, would you,” and he closed his eyes against the burn of tears.  
  
He said, “Wake up, Charles, please, I can try to take over your government but—but I’d really rather have you with me, at my side, so wake up now.”  
  
The page Kitty brought him actual coffee, scrounged up from G-d knew where, and a bacon sandwich and more biscuits. He gazed at it and wondered with agonizing tired calculation what message Emma Frost was sending, and why.  
  
Morning light burned pale through the window, shredding fog outside at his back.  
  
He put his head down on his folded arms, on the side of Charles’s bed. He wanted Charles to touch him, to run a hand over his hair, to tell him that he’d done well.  
  
He thought that he was dreaming. He knew he was; he felt exactly what he’d wanted, those soft fingertips stroking his head, accepting his offering, king and loyal knight.  
  
Dreaming, he murmured, “Charles, please wake up.”  
  
“I am.” That voice held a hint of laughter. “You’re not.”  
  
Erik bolted upright, and bolted out, “Charles—”  
  
“I’m alive.” Sapphire eyes found his; that beloved face looked too young and too pale, but awake and alert, if drawn and pinched by pain. “You’re alive.”  
  
“Charles,” Erik choked out.  
  
“I thought,” Charles said, and stopped to breathe, but he wasn’t coughing so badly anymore, he wasn’t unconscious in Erik’s arms, “if I made you a Baron—we’re overturning the government in any case, I think I can marry whomever I want, though there might’ve been…some argument…if you hadn’t been…at least nobility…”  
  
“Yes,” Erik said, and then, “…marry?”  
  
“Oh,” Charles said. “Would you—if you don’t want to—I’m so sorry, that was a dream, I just thought if we both miraculously made it through the night we could do something else miraculous—”  
  
The world hung crumpled and rebuilding, outside. Men and women would need new livelihoods; clean-up and restoration would be a herculean effort, from the scrubbing of soot off pale rain-washed stone to the rebirth of an entirely new royal home for the arts. The new order lived in precarious high-wire balance; the king was still underage and terribly frighteningly frail, and the Regent was dead, and one of the new Small Council members wasn’t even a Westchester native. Victor Creed’s body hadn’t been among those recovered.  
  
Sunlight glittered through the infirmary window, lying in a long stripe over the end of the bed, the flagstone floor.  
  
“Yes,” Erik said again, to his king, to his lover, to his Charles, “yes.”


	13. epilogue: pineapple layers in a wedding-cake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! Thank you for reading, and for putting up with my slowness at various points. This is for all of you. Thank you.
> 
> Here: a happy ending, at last.

They stood in the throne room, at midnight. Or rather Erik stood, looking at both thrones, somewhat thoughtfully; he’d settled Charles into the actual king’s seat a few seconds before. The brand-new Royal Consort’s chair watched him, magenta cushions and gold trim faded to smoky purple and secret glints by the midnight silence.  
  
“Come try it out,” Charles said.  
  
Erik turned back to him, said, “I like this one better,” and scooped him up—those expressive eyebrows went up in momentary protest—and sat down on the throne with his betrothed future husband in his lap. Charles laughed, and leaned back against him—light as a sparrow but alive, and Erik’s heart hurt with bittersweet joy—and said, “I like this better too, though technically that’s some sort of terrible treasonous impertinence,” and tilted his head back to kiss Erik’s jaw.  
  
The throne room stretched out big and bare and cavernous, silky with moonlight.  
  
Nobody else would be here until morning, Erik knew. Then the empty space would fill up with petitioners and Council members; noise would echo from columns and high ceilings. The scent of Charles’s tea would waft through the air, and they’d hear audiences all morning, and then go and meet with various committees about newfangled steam-engines and University scholarships for the children of refugees and a report from the all-new trade delegation that’d been dispatched to Wakanda. In the evening they’d go to a lecture about a newly proposed theory of cellular structure, and then he’d take Charles home and very gently take Charles in their big shared bed, unless Charles happened to be feeling excited and demanding after the scientific lecture, in which case Erik would gladly obediently follow his king’s every command, letting inventive hands wring pleasure from both their bodies.   
  
Charles couldn’t put weight on that leg, and remained easily exhausted, but was thoroughly curious and creative, and had acquired an impressive arsenal of toys to use on Erik when his own body was spent. Erik was taking this as a challenge. He had a few ideas for their wedding-night; he’d been secretly practicing rope-knots and bondage that wouldn’t stress Charles’s leg, and he was planning to see how many fingers, or possibly a whole hand, that gorgeous seventeen-year-old body could take inside. Charles did love sensation, after all.  
  
He shifted under Charles’s weight, on his lap.  
  
“Oh, hello,” Charles said, “thinking about ravishing me in our throne? I would enjoy that immensely, I think.”  
  
“Yes, but not yet,” Erik said, and just enjoyed holding him, leaning his cheek in wavy dark hair, liking the lazy throb of distant arousal. “Your reforms go through tomorrow.”  
  
“Some of them.” Charles now sounded distracted by politics. It’d taken three months to push the first reformation motions through; the Lords hadn’t wanted representation from the commons in government at all, but had seen reason, or at least had seen that shared power was preferable to revolution. Charles had spent quite a lot of those months flat on his back, giving orders from bed, Raven hovering at his side. “It’s a first step. We’ll have a lot of work to do; some of Shaw’s supporters, the ones he rewarded with titles, are still vocal in the General Council and they hate me.”  
  
“You could just strip them of those titles,” Erik said. This was an argument they’d had before.  
  
“That wouldn’t solve the problem, and it would be an arbitrary exercise of power, which is something he’d’ve done, and I won’t.” Charles made a face. “Not that I’ve not been thinking about it. Worked for Essex.”  
  
“Loss of medical license, lands and income forfeit, and exile beyond the borders,” Erik agreed. He’d wanted to kill the man. Charles had considered the option—torture of the Heir’s body could certainly be grounds for execution—but had decided that enough blood had been shed on the first day of his rule.   
  
Victor Creed’s body had turned up after all, two days later. He’d been caught in the fire; that death hadn’t been clean, or so Logan’d stated, and no one wanted to press him on it. Charles and Emma Frost had worn nearly the same expression for a moment, seeing the charred but recognizable remains.  
  
“Elections,” Charles said. “Free and open. I imagine Armando will win his; he’s an excellent voice of reason, and I plan to put him on as many committees as possible.”  
  
“He’ll need time,” Erik said, “with Alex.”  
  
“Yes.” Charles paused. “Yes.” Alex’s brother was still missing; no one knew what Sebastian Shaw had done with him. Charles had guessed that he wasn’t dead—Shaw would’ve hated to lose potential leverage, and Alex Summers had once been employed at the palace—and had people out searching Shaw’s known boltholes.  
  
“Maybe even someday,” Charles said, softly, “the monarchy—I’m not exactly planning to reproduce, given my family history, and electoral reform could avoid another Regency like—but that’s not practical yet, of course.”  
  
“You? Being practical?”  
  
“You’re rubbing off on me—oh, and literally, too, thank you.” Charles laughed. “My birthday’s only a few months away.”  
  
“You mean our wedding,” Erik said. Charles had become king while technically underage by sheer force of will, and everyone understood that he was holding uneasy shifting territories together, revolutionaries and traditionalists eying each other like wary cats; no one wanted to upset that precarious lifeboat. Some traditions even Charles couldn’t get around, however, and even though they were happily nakedly scandalizing royal bedsheets and libraries and once the kitchens, the Chief Justice had put her foot down: the king couldn’t get married until the second he turned eighteen. This had been a sop to horrified moral purists and a means to comfort those who thought the world was changing too fast. Erik thought they were all idiots, but he got to sleep with Charles in any case, so he could regard the delay of the unnecessary ceremony with equanimity.   
  
He could regard many things that way, he was discovering. He could know calm; he could look at Charles and feel a smile, deep down inside. He would forever carry anger; that part of his heart would not go away. He was glad that Sebastian Shaw was dead.  
  
But he could see, after that death, a building, and rebuilding, of a City. And he was not afraid of challenges.  
  
Nor was he afraid of grandly dramatic public declarations of love, or wedding-ceremonies. But in any case Charles had needed and still needed time to recover. He was better now—and ultimately, no longer being force-fed drugs and strange potions, and getting regular exercise and food, would be better even than when they’d met, despite the injury he’d always carry. But Erik dreamed, sometimes, of blue eyes closing, of those fingers limp in his.  
  
“Hardly soon enough,” Charles said, squirming around on his lap in the grand chair so they were nose to nose, mischief in those eyes, the sprawling quiet throne room full of indigo shadows like promises of dawn. “I’ll be officially your husband. And you’ll be mine. I expect a pineapple-flavored wedding cake. My fruit-merchant.”  
  
Erik, who had been plotting precisely this in stolen hours with their royal bakers, said, “I’ll see what I can do, Charles,” and kissed him.

**Author's Note:**

> Now with [a gorgeous fan mix playlist by garrideb](http://luninosity.tumblr.com/post/123832543394/almondmocha-a-fruit-vendors-cart-becomes-an)...
> 
> ...and [more adorable art by picklestpickle](http://luninosity.tumblr.com/post/116859949774/picklestpickle-happy-birthday-to-luninosity)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover art for "Scenes from a Pineapple Revolution"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135023) by [avictoriangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avictoriangirl/pseuds/avictoriangirl)
  * [Art inspired by Scenes from a Pineapple Revolution](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4483976) by [Mikanskey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikanskey/pseuds/Mikanskey)




End file.
